Oral Answers to Questions

TREASURY

The Chancellor of the Exchequer was asked—

International Finance Facility

Helen Jackson: What support he has received from EU partners for his international finance facility proposal.

John McFall: If he will make a statement on the international finance facility.

Gordon Brown: I can report that at the International Monetary Fund Committee meeting in Dubai, which I chaired, the proposed international finance facility—which I am pleased to say has received all-party support in this House—received wide support in principle from other countries, including EU countries. The meetings mandated the IMF and the World Bank to report back in 2004 on such a proposal that, by doubling aid, could halve poverty.

Helen Jackson: I thank my right hon. Friend for that reply. Does he agree, however, that there was widespread disappointment at the breakdown of the Cancun talks, given that the global disparities between rich and poor remain and, indeed, grow? Will he consider a virtual relaunch of his excellent IFF initiative, so that it can breathe new life into the efforts that the Government are making to reduce those inequalities?

Gordon Brown: I am grateful to my hon. Friend. As she rightly says, what we need is the equivalent of a Marshall plan for Africa and the developing countries. If the developed countries would agree to it, the IFF would offer $50 billion extra a year to make possible the achievement of the millennium development goals. My hon. Friend is right to say that we must do more. I do not think that I would call it a relaunch, as such—we in this Government do not do such things. First, a series of meetings with the developing countries will take place in the next few months, and I have already addressed a group of African Finance Ministers. Secondly, we will talk to the Churches, which are a very important element in this matter. We will hold a joint conference with the Churches and the president of the World Bank in London in February. Thirdly, we are working with the non-governmental organisations. Another important factor is that I will meet the all-party international development committee in the next few weeks to talk about these issues. In other words, we are working towards securing the public opinion that is necessary to push the initiative forward, in the same way as we pushed forward debt relief.

John McFall: My right hon. Friend will be aware that I visited Zambia in May. He kindly put me in contact with the Finance Minister and other Ministers there. His IFF is absolutely crucial for countries such as Zambia because the HIPC initiative is not working for it, and the millennium development goals will not be achieved because of the country's massive debt repayments of $6.5 billion. Its repayments greatly overshadow expenditure on health, education and social programmes. Will my right hon. Friend therefore ensure that his initiative gains greater currency throughout the world, because Africa needs it? Also, will he have a private word with me later, as I am having a Christmas appeal for Zambia and am looking for a private donation from him? I hope that he will provide a good example for my constituents.

Gordon Brown: As Mr. Speaker knows, money does not change hands in this House, but I shall be very happy to back the efforts in which my hon. Friend, who is Chairman of the Treasury Committee, has been involved. In addition, I shall be happy to support the efforts of all campaigners around the country trying to make people aware of the sheer need in the developing countries. At the moment, all the world's aid spent on the health of the typical African child amounts to £2.50 a year. That is simply not enough to prevent the disease and suffering that takes place. We must first recognise the amount of money that is needed—at least $10 billion for education and $15 billion for health, and many more millions are also needed for the anti-poverty programme. We must then persuade people that the IFF is a way forward that could release the money in the time that is necessary for achievement of the millennium development goals. I therefore support my hon. Friend's activities, and those of other hon. Members who are very much involved in these matters.

Andrew Selous: A moment ago, the Chancellor mentioned his discussions with the World Bank. Is he satisfied that that institution is taking the issue of microcredit seriously enough? Amounts as small as $50 can make a huge difference to the enterprise of individual families throughout the developing world.

Gordon Brown: The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. Microcredit is incredibly important, especially in African and Asian countries, if we are going to develop the economic base essential for a permanent reduction of poverty. I have talked to the president of the World Bank about exactly that issue. I held a meeting with others in the Treasury to discuss a number of proposals about microcredit and how we can promote it. I assure the hon. Gentleman that the World Bank is being pushed by everybody to move forward with microcredit. If he looks at the World Bank's latest report on the questions of debt sustainability and of additional resources, he will find that it deals with them very usefully.

HIPC Initiative

George Foulkes: What recent assessment he has made of the progress of the highly indebted poor countries initiative; and what further action he proposes to take.

Gordon Brown: I can report that 27 countries have started to receive debt relief, now worth up to $70 billion, and eight have now completed the process. I can announce also that, to create a sustainable exit from debt burdens, the UK will support a further change in the calculation of topping-up at completion point, which could provide a further $1 billion in debt relief. The majority of that money would go to health and education.

George Foulkes: Am I allowed to congratulate the Chancellor on the lead that he and successive International Development Secretaries have taken on the HIPC initiative throughout the world? I know from my experience that that is doing a great deal not only to reduce poverty in the world but to improve the conditions in which terrorism has been thriving hitherto. The initiative helps to make conditions better for people who might be tempted into terrorism. Does he agree that more countries should be benefiting? We have to be honest about this. Some people in some countries are not benefiting because their leaders are either corrupt or undermining some of the work that the international community is trying to do. Can we also take—[Interruption.] Can we take the initiative to promote democracy in those countries too?

Gordon Brown: My right hon. Friend is a respected former International Development Minister and he should be listened to because his views carry weight not only in this country but abroad—[Interruption.] Conservative Members are making a lot of noise for a very small number of people—in fact, fewer than 25. I did not think that that sort of number were allowed to meet at the moment.
	On debt relief, eight countries have now completed the process. That means that we are in a position to release more than half of the $100 billion that was pledged at Cologne. The United Kingdom has provided $2 billion in debt relief, the Export Credits Guarantee Department has written off nearly $1 billion and we have contributed $500 million to the HIPC trust fund. So, we will continue to push the issue forward by our own contributions but will ensure that countries can genuinely have a sustainable exit from debt.
	On corruption, it is a condition of the international finance facility that countries are open and transparent in the way they conduct their fiscal and monetary policies. The money will be released on that basis and that basis alone.

Andrew Robathan: I am glad to hear what the Chancellor had to say about open and transparent policies. I do not think that there is much difference between us on HIPC. What is his response to the Jubilee debt campaign, which has written to all Members of Parliament this week to ask in particular whether the process could be extended to all countries? I would certainly have a few problems with that.

Gordon Brown: The priority on HIPC is the 36 or so lowest-income countries. That is the way we have proceeded. The international finance facility is the proper way forward for low-income countries that are not part of the HIPC group. In other words, if they can assure us that they are taking the action that the hon. Gentleman and I think is right—that they are transparent and are opening up to trade and investment—we will provide the resources necessary for health and education, which is our duty. So, the HIPC process must be completed with the low-income countries. That is our priority. The international finance facility is the way forward for other countries that are not part of that process.

International Aid

Tony Clarke: If he will make a statement on progress towards the target of 0.7 per cent. of national income being devoted to international aid.

Paul Boateng: I recently attended the Commonwealth Finance Ministers' conference and was able to inform our colleagues that in the 2002 spending review the United Kingdom announced and is now delivering the largest ever increase in aid, raising aid commitments to developing countries from 0.32 per cent of national income in 2002–03 to 0.4 per cent by 2005–06.

Tony Clarke: I welcome my right hon. Friend's commitment and, indeed, the Chancellor's continued commitment to meeting that 0.7 per cent. target. I am sure that he will agree that aid effectiveness is as important as aid volume. Given that 8 per cent. of all adults in sub-Saharan Africa are HIV infected, 42 million people live with HIV/AIDS and 5 million were infected last year alone, how can we ensure that much of that aid money goes to combating that dreadful and awful virus?

Paul Boateng: My hon. Friend displays a concern about the impact of the AIDS pandemic that is shared on both sides of the House. Its effect has been disastrous not only socially and in human terms, but economically. That is why last year alone we invested about £250 million on HIV/AIDS plus support programmes for multilateral agencies, including £14 million on the international AIDS vaccine initiative. Absolutely central to that are the poverty reduction partnerships and their links with civil society—non-governmental organisations on the ground in the developing world—because they are often best placed to identify and meet the needs. It is that combined approach, using agencies such as the global health fund and working with civil society on the ground, that will deliver the help that is needed.

Crispin Blunt: Is the Chief Secretary aware that in 1995–96 only Holland and the United Kingdom met the United Nations higher target of 1 per cent. of gross domestic product transfer from developed countries to the developing world, a combination of private and public sector transfers? Does he agree that that higher target should be our policy focus? Only the combination of public and private sector investment in the developing world will enable the wealth creation and investment that will take it out of poverty.

Paul Boateng: The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. A characteristic of the cross-party approach to development issues is that we have all recognised the importance of private flows and the way that they leverage so much additional benefit on the ground in the developing world. That was the subject matter of a number of our discussions at the Commonwealth Finance Ministers' conference and we shall be continuing that work, as the Chancellor has indicated.

Alan Whitehead: In my right hon. Friend's pursuit of those targets, is he applying the principle of the disarticulation of aid from compulsory trade? In his discussions with other Ministers in those fields, has he enunciated and advocated that principle?

Paul Boateng: My hon. Friend is absolutely right. The United Kingdom has distinguished itself by making sure that we increase aid effectiveness, which we have done by about 15 to 30 per cent. Central to that has been cutting the insidious link to which he referred. We are not alone in that, but we still have to fight a battle internationally to make the point that we must untie aid if we are to do the most good. We must concentrate aid where it can be most effective in helping the poorest in those societies rather than simply lining the pockets of the already wealthy.

Gregory Barker: The increased amount of international aid is greatly to the credit of the Government. The Chancellor has spoken about increased transparency in aid and debt relief, but can the Chief Secretary tell us what practical steps have been taken to increase the audit of the delivery of aid on the ground? What new processes and steps are in place?

Paul Boateng: We are offering help to the developing world in achieving stability through a greater emphasis on getting its fiscal and monetary policy right. On transparency, good governance is central, which is why we supported initiatives such as the New Partnership for Africa's Development. As I said earlier, we are also unlocking the potential of civil society, so that in a country such as Malawi the Churches, the trade unions and women's organisations all follow through to see where the money goes. They visit schools; they ask how many new desks have been bought and how many teachers are on the payroll. Furthermore, they actually ask to meet the teachers, because we all know that, unfortunately, in some of those countries those are phantoms—the teachers do not really exist. Utilising civil society as well as establishing good governance is the best way to ensure aid effectiveness.

Full Employment

Win Griffiths: If he will make a statement on his aim to achieve full employment.

Gordon Brown: Unemployment in Britain this year has been at its lowest since 1975. More people are in work than at any time in our history and our unemployment is lower than Japan, America, Germany, France and the whole of the euro area. Today, we are publishing our submission to the European review of employment and the pre-Budget report will contain measures to enhance the new deal, including measures to help people into self-employment and to start new businesses, as we advance to our goal of full employment.

Win Griffiths: I thank my right hon. Friend for the tremendous work that he has done at the Treasury and with other Ministers in promoting that policy of full employment. I was surprised that he did not mention the fact that for the first time ever the unemployment rate in some of the nations and regions of the UK, such as Wales, which has often been above the national average, is now below the average—all thanks to the policies that my right hon. Friend and his fellow Ministers have pursued.
	Will my right hon. Friend undertake intensive negotiations with his European counterparts to ensure that the good work being done in this country can also be done in the rest of Europe and enable us to join the euro much earlier than is currently anticipated?

Gordon Brown: My hon. Friend is absolutely right about Wales. There have been 103,000 additional jobs created since 1997, and Welsh unemployment has fallen significantly, particularly among the young and the long-term unemployed.
	As for the exportability of our proposals on employment, I have regular talks with my European Finance Minister colleagues. The French and German Finance Ministers signed a joint letter with me to our European colleagues, and we are proposing that the same incentives that are available in welfare to work and our new deal should be available in the rest of Europe. Equally, at the same time, we are promoting flexibility in the European labour markets, which is the means by which we can return to a position where full employment can be a realistic goal in Europe. It is unfortunate, however, that the one group of people who want to abolish the new deal is the modern Conservative party.

Mark Field: Perhaps the Chancellor would like to enlighten us about what proportion of the much-vaunted job growth of the past two years has been in the private, as opposed to the public, sector.

Gordon Brown: A significant part of the growth has been in the private sector. I think that, of the 1.7 million additional jobs that have been created, the vast majority are in the private sector. When the hon. Gentleman wishes to disparage the public sector and wishes to talk about pen-pushers in the public sector, let him remember that, among the additional jobs, are 50,000 nurses, 20,000 teachers, 90,000 classroom assistants and 10,000 doctors, all of whose jobs would be at risk under his policies.

George Mudie: I congratulate the Chancellor on the fact that for the first time in my constituency, under this Labour Administration, unemployment has halved in a very poor part of Leeds, but he will be aware that we are now entering a phase when, whether for reasons of age, health, lack of skills or drugs, it is becoming more difficult to put certain unemployed people into work. In his next Budget will he consider adding to his existing very good initiatives some imaginative, joined-up, targeted approaches to deal with those very difficult individuals to get them into work, so that they can enjoy the prosperity that work brings to families?

Gordon Brown: I commend my hon. Friend for his proposals for the Leeds community that are designed to create more jobs and more prosperity in areas of high unemployment. He is absolutely right that the focus of our employment policies must alter to help those who have been hard to employ, those with no skills whatsoever and those who have been in prison or had other experience that makes them unattractive to employers. We can help them and, equally, we must help more single parents back into work. The problem is that the one party that wishes to abolish the new deal for young people, the new deal for the long-term unemployed and the new deal for single parents is the Conservative party. The only new deal that the Conservatives want to keep is the new deal for the over-50s, perhaps because they may have to use it themselves soon.

Vincent Cable: Does the Chancellor accept the arguments of the Governor of the Bank of England that, with unemployment at 1.5 million or 5 per cent., the Government are as close to full employment as they are likely to get, that there is therefore no spare capacity and that we can look forward to a decade of below-trend growth and rising interest rates? If there is a fallacy in the Government's argument, could the Chancellor tell us what it is?

Gordon Brown: First, may I welcome the hon. Gentleman to his new post as the shadow Chancellor from Twickenham? I have worked with him in the past. Indeed, we were in the same political party. We wrote together in the same publications. It may be that, at some point, I could share with the House his views of the Labour party's policy, which were very enthusiastic at that time, but perhaps that is for another day, Mr. Speaker.
	When I gave the Mais lecture on full employment, which the hon. Gentleman will be interested in, I said that we could further reduce unemployment, not simply by maintaining macro-economic stability and enhancing the British economy's productivity, but by the supply-side measures that would include training people who could get jobs but who otherwise would not be able to get them and by exercising pay responsibility. Those are the conditions in which I believe we could create more jobs in the British economy and reduce unemployment further, so, unfortunately, I disagree with him on the first point. I believe that we can both create more jobs and reduce unemployment further, and our goal is full employment.

Dennis Skinner: Does the Chancellor recall that about three years ago I asked him for £24 million to flatten the Shirebrook pit site to provide up to 2,000 jobs—more than the number who worked down the coal mine at the time? That construction is well under way, the road has been developed and things are looking well. I now have a further plan for the Markham Bolsover employment zone, which will cost about twice as much and will release an area for 5,000 jobs, just off the M1 at junction 29A. I hope that that is etched in his memory, and we will sort that out in the next couple of years.

Gordon Brown: I am grateful to my hon. Friend. It is always an expensive Question Time when he asks me a question. What has been done to create jobs in former mining areas, through the various initiatives in which Members have taken part, is not only commendable but is bringing prosperity to areas that had lost hope. I will certainly look at his further proposal without making financial commitments to it.

Dennis Skinner: Just the first tranche.

Gordon Brown: So my hon. Friend is not asking for £48 million at the moment, but only for a fraction of that. It is important that in every area of the country where unemployment is too high we take action. That is behind the proposal for 2,000 new enterprise areas, and his constituency will benefit from many of those.

Howard Flight: In order to create sustainable full employment, I am sure that the Chancellor agrees about the importance of maintaining our business competitiveness, in which a key factor is the level of business taxation. The CBI's recent report produced from the Government's Red Book figures shows that since the Government came to power, and by 2006, there will be a cumulative increase in the tax burden on business of £54 billion. Government spin has been that the CBI figures are wrong. Will the Chancellor please explain why?

Gordon Brown: I am grateful that the shadow Chief Secretary is up to explain how we can create full employment without a new deal and by cutting public expenditure by 20 per cent. As for what business is saying about the Government, I do not think that he would like me to read out what Digby Jones said to the Conservative party conference—[Interruption.] He does not like it, does he? Not only did he say that the Conservatives could no longer rely on the business community but that the Government had created the macro-economic stability that was the only basis on which we could have prosperity in this country. As for the CBI report, it says that, in 1995, taking everything into account, business taxation was 9.3 per cent. of public expenditure. It then says that, in 2003, business taxation is 8.9 per cent. of public expenditure. That is a fall, not a rise.

Anne Campbell: Does my right hon. Friend agree that a necessary prerequisite of full employment is an adequate supply of good-quality child care, which this Government have done more to provide than any other previous Government? That is the way to ensure that there is full employment for women as well as men.

Gordon Brown: My hon. Friend is absolutely right. I praise her for putting the issue on the agenda. Only one in nine of the child care places that are needed are currently available, and even though we have made huge advances, there is a great deal more to do. It is partly about the supply of child care places that the industry is capable of producing, and it is partly about making sure that resources are available to those who could otherwise not afford child care. In 1997, 40,000 people received the child care tax credit that we inherited. Today, that figure is 250,000, which is a sixfold increase. We are determined to do more. Parents should not have to face the choice between the children they love and the work that they must do without us being in a position to help them properly. That demands—as I hope that there would be—all-party support for child care expansion.

Peter Tapsell: As it remains the policy of the Labour Government to join the euro as soon as the Chancellor's five economic tests have allegedly been met, does he think that Britain could then continue to maintain a high level of employment, bearing in mind the very large rise in unemployment in both Germany and France since they joined the single European currency?

Gordon Brown: This is indeed one of our tests—the effect on employment. I reported and I will continue to report to the House about how that test is being met.
	As for the single currency, the hon. Gentleman should realise that we are saying that we will make a decision on that in the national economic interest. The problem about his position and that of his party is that they would rule out a single currency even if it were in the national economic interest.

State Pension

Bob Spink: If he will make a statement on changes in the level of state pension in the last three years.

Dawn Primarolo: The basic state pension has risen by £5.30 a week over inflation for single pensioners and by £8.50 a week for couples since 2000—a cash increase of nearly £10 a week for single pensioners and nearly £16 a week for couples. Increases over the last three years have given single pensioners £1.10 a week more than an earnings link would have given them, and £1.75 a week for couples.

Bob Spink: Means-testing has grown like Topsy—from 40 per cent. in 1997 to almost 60 per cent. today, with a Government target to take it to 80 per cent. What would the Paymaster General say to my constituent, Joan Spey of Age Concern in Castle Point, whose friends and colleagues in Age Concern are very proud people? They deeply resent the intolerable intrusion into their lives that means-testing brings. What would she say to those people?

Dawn Primarolo: The intolerable intrusion is the poverty created for pensioners under the previous Government. As the hon. Gentleman well knows, on the basis of a measure of absolute poverty, more than 1.5 million pensioners have been taken out of poverty since 1997. He also well knows that the fair way forward on pensions must have the basic state pension underpinning people's income in retirement while, at the same time, we target maximum support on the very poorest pensioners. He also knows that the proposals that he has put forward will not help poor pensioners and will not be sustainable. I am sure that Age Concern and his constituents understand those points very well.

Diane Abbott: My right hon. Friend will be aware how grateful pensioners are for the many measures that the Government have taken on their behalf. However, she will also be aware that the problem of trying to address pensioner poverty by means-tested benefits is not just that every single representative pensioners organisation is against means-tested benefits. There is the problem of take-up. She will be aware that, after 10 years of take-up campaigns, substantial numbers of pensioners simply refuse to claim that to which they are entitled. Is she able to tell the House the latest statistics for the number of pensioners entitled to means-tested benefits who do not claim them?

Dawn Primarolo: I know that my hon. Friend follows these matters very closely. She is quite right to suggest that the huge challenge continues to be to make sure that those pensioners entitled to the pension credit or the minimum income guarantee receive that money alongside the fuel allowance and the free television licences. However, I can tell her that more than 2 million pensioners already receive the pension credit, which will give so much more to pensioners, and more than 1 million have contacted the Department. The Pension Service, which is directed particularly to pensioners, will do much to deal with the very points that she has made.

Mark Prisk: The truth is that, despite the Paymaster General's warm words, more and more pensioners rely not on the state pension but on means-tested benefits. As hon. Members on both sides have said, those pensioners deeply resent the intrusion and complexity involved with them. Despite her words and the Chancellor's promise
	"to end the means test for our elderly people",
	the Government's plans now seek 80 per cent. of pensioners to be means-tested. Perhaps the Paymaster General will answer the question that the Prime Minister failed to answer yesterday. How much will a typical pensioner couple now have to save over their lifetime in order to avoid a means test?

Dawn Primarolo: The hon. Gentleman knows full well that the question that has to be answered is how—

Hon. Members: Answer the question!

Mr. Speaker: Order. Let the right hon. Lady answer the question—[Hon. Members: "Hear, hear."]—in her own way.

Dawn Primarolo: I will, Mr. Speaker, if I can get more than half a dozen words out.
	As the hon. Gentleman knows, the first issue with regard to pension policy is how to ensure that those in poverty are raised out of poverty. The pension credit and other measures that have been introduced since 1997 ensure that the poorest third of pensioners are better off. The second set of issues that must be addressed—the issues are being addressed by consultation on the pensions Green Paper—is exactly how we combine ensuring that we target the poorest pensioners by giving the basic state pension as the foundation for retirement and assisting people to save for their retirement. All those matters are being addressed, and the pension credit will further assist that by encouraging people to save while still rewarding them.

Tees Valley

Vera Baird: What plans he has to direct public investment to the Tees valley sub-region.

John Healey: The Tees valley sub-region, like all parts of the UK, is benefiting from the increased public investment that the Government are putting in. In addition to national investment, the regional development agency, One NorthEast, is investing £15 million this year and £24 million next year directly in the Tees valley.

Vera Baird: I am grateful for that answer, although my question was clearly not as transparent as it should have been. I wanted to hear a comment about the Lyons inquiry, which favours the dispersal of civil service jobs to the regions on the presumed business case that that would be less expensive than if the jobs were in London. The Chancellor has spoken about dispersing 20,000 jobs in that way, but if the business case shows that more can go, can that number be merely a minimum so that more can follow, and can the Tees valley, with its adaptable work force and the lowest commercial property prices in the UK, go on the list of potential recipients?

John Healey: I pay tribute to how consistently my hon. and learned Friend has pursued that case. I spoke at her regional chamber of commerce in the Tees valley last month and there is great interest in, and commitment to, the Tees valley partnership bid for the relocation of civil service jobs. I confirm that Sir Michael Lyons made it clear that it was not his intention to dictate the public sector functions that should be relocated or where there should be relocation to. I confirm that relocations should be based on business proposals that Departments are preparing as part of the spending review process. I also confirm what my right hon. Friend the Chancellor has made clear: we are looking at the relocation of at least 20,000 London-based civil service jobs to the regions.

Chris Grayling: rose—

Mr. Speaker: Order. The hon. Gentleman's constituency is quite a distance from the Tees valley.

Euro

George Osborne: How many events he has attended as part of the Government's euro information campaign launched in June.

Ruth Kelly: Ministers, including my right hon. Friend the Chancellor, have held a variety of meetings to discuss the euro in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. In addition, Treasury officials have held more than 150 meetings with opinion formers in Britain and Europe since the Chancellor's statement on 9 June.

George Osborne: I am glad to see that the Minister now keeps the Chancellor's diary. She will know, as everyone knows, that the Chancellor of the Exchequer won his battle with the Prime Minister and that there will not be a euro referendum before the general election. Does she think that the Chancellor could be more magnanimous in victory and go along with the charade of the roadshow, at least to save the Prime Minister's face?

Ruth Kelly: I feel, perhaps, that I need to reassure the hon. Gentleman, who takes a great interest in these matters. The euro has, indeed, been discussed at every level in the Treasury. I emphasise again that more than 150 meetings have been held throughout Europe and throughout Britain—in every country in Britain.

Barry Sheerman: Does my hon. Friend agree that the preparation for the euro is no joking matter? It is a serious enterprise that affects the whole of our economy and our future. Would she comment on the fact not only that we need a euro information campaign throughout the country, but that it would be nice if the official Opposition joined the cross-party group on the euro?

Ruth Kelly: My hon. Friend makes an important point. We have a euro preparations committee, which is open to parties across the House, and there is one political party that refuses to join.

George Osborne: Are you a member?

Ruth Kelly: Of course I am. The Government have the right policy—to prepare and decide. That is what we will do. The Tory policy is to deprive the British people of the opportunity to join, whether or not it is in the national economic interest to do so. They say "No, never," dogmatically. Ours is the commonsense position—prepare and decide.

Peter Lilley: Can the Minister confirm that if any country that is already a member of the euro were to apply the five tests that the Chancellor applies and find that the euro was not in its national interest, as would appear to be the case from some of the statistics that he has given, there is absolutely nothing that that country could do about it? In the course of the Minister's education campaign, does she spell out the fact that membership is irrevocable?

Ruth Kelly: We have, of course, emphasised the strategic importance of decisions on the euro, which is why we are committed to a triple lock on the euro decision—a vote in Cabinet, a vote in Parliament and a referendum of the British people. The quality of the analysis that the Treasury undertook in its assessment of the five national economic tests to see whether it is in Britain's national interest to join was widely commended throughout Europe whenever it was presented.

John Cryer: Can my hon. Friend remind the House of who signed us up to the charter of economic euro-fundamentalism in the first place?

Ruth Kelly: My hon. Friend is, I think, referring to the Maastricht treaty. It is clear to everyone in the House who signed the Maastricht treaty. [Hon. Members: "We had an opt-out."] We have the correct policy on the euro. If it is in our national British economic interest to join, we shall do so.

Michael Howard: I hope that when the Minister next comes to the Dispatch Box, she will answer the question put to her by my right hon. Friend the Member for Hitchin and Harpenden (Mr. Lilley). Perhaps she can tell us, too, whether all the internal discussions in the Treasury to which she referred were included in the diary items that she listed in her first response. Is it not the case that the Prime Minister told the House that as part of the roadshow, there have been 60 visits from Foreign Office Ministers, but No. 10 said that none involved him and that none was planned; the Treasury said there were too many events to list but that they had all been low-key, that there was no specific start date and that it could not identify any of them; the Foreign Office said the events had not even started, and the Minister for Europe said that it was never meant to be a literal roadshow—it was all just a figure of speech? Have not these conflicting statements on the roadshow degenerated into total farce, and is it not impossible for the Minister to clear the matter up, whatever she says?

Ruth Kelly: I find it extraordinary that the right hon. and learned Gentleman can talk about the diary commitments of Treasury Ministers, when I have made it plain to the House that my right hon. Friend the Chancellor has had meetings with business leaders, industry and unions. He has been discussing the euro, and Treasury officials have had well over 150 meetings across the country and across Europe.

Phyllis Starkey: Given the indications that, since the introduction of the euro, trade between countries within the eurozone has increased, is it not even more important that British businesses be well informed about the euro and its consequences for them, if we are to maintain our share of European markets and the jobs in Britain that depend on then?

Ruth Kelly: My hon. Friend makes an important point. British trade has increased, which is why the impact on investment, foreign investment, jobs and prosperity are key to our assessment of the five economic tests. It is also why we have a euro information campaign, and why we have set up standing committees not only in England, but in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, so that business, industry, the unions and all other key stakeholders in the process will be fully engaged and informed, as necessary.

Consumer Prices Index

Bill Wiggin: When the harmonised index of consumer prices measure of inflation has been below 1 per cent. since January 2000; and if he will make a statement.

John Healey: The HICP inflation figures are published monthly by the Office for National Statistics. As my right hon. Friend the Chancellor said in the summer in this House, that measure gives a more complete picture of spending patterns by all consumers. It is the most comparable measure internationally, and it is used by our European neighbours. That is why, subject to confirmation at the pre-Budget report, he intends to change the inflation target to the consumer prices definition.

Bill Wiggin: Will the Governor of the Bank of England be writing letters, given that the new index—known as HICP, or hiccup—has fallen below the 2 per cent. target several dozen times? Will not that contribute to a significant imbalance in the stability of our monetary policy?

John Healey: On the contrary, last month the Governor of the Bank of England confirmed to the Select Committee on the Treasury that a change in target is not likely to be a big factor in setting monetary policy and that HICP is a better measure of inflation than RPIX. That is why my right hon. Friend the Chancellor has said that, subject to confirmation at the pre-Budget report, he intends to change the inflation target to that measure.

James Plaskitt: The Minister knows that as a rule the harmonised prices index runs 1 per cent. lower than RPIX. The Chancellor has indicated that were it to be introduced, benefits would remain tied to RPIX. Would my hon. Friend expect it to become the benchmark for wage settlements?

John Healey: Both the Treasury and the Bank of England have confirmed that the estimate of long-term divergence is 0.5 per cent., not 1 per cent. As my right hon. Friend the Chancellor has made clear, the index is a better measure for the conduct of monetary policy and the decisions that hang from it. Pensions, index-linked gilts and benefits will remain tied to the current measure of inflation, so pensioners should have no fear that they will lose out.

Michael Howard: But is not this change bedevilled by confusion? Were Treasury sources right when they suggested that implementation might be delayed until the Budget or that alternative options might be considered, including delaying implementation for two years or trying to run the two systems in parallel for a while? Can the Minister confirm that the HICP index is likely to be revised? Has not this ill considered change thrown monetary policy into wholly unnecessary confusion and uncertainty?

John Healey: I have no idea what the right hon. and learned Gentleman is talking about. His remarks are based not on fact, but on pure imagination. The principal change to the HICP index was made in 1996. As I said to the hon. Member for Leominster (Mr. Wiggin), this series of figures has been published monthly by the Office for National Statistics: I suggest that the right hon. and learned Gentleman consult it.

Michael Howard: I remind the Minister that the Governor of the Bank of England suggested that changing the target in this way is comparable to David Beckham taking a shot on goal only to see that someone has moved the goalposts. Does he agree with the Governor's view that leaving out housing costs would be "strange"—that is his word—and might confuse people? The fact is that this change has absolutely nothing to do with the economic needs of the country: it stems from the shabby compromise cobbled together by the Chancellor and the Prime Minister on the euro. Is not monetary stability being put at risk as a result?

John Healey: I suspect that David Beckham would have welcomed somebody moving the goalposts when he was taking his penalty kick against Turkey last Saturday. If the right hon. and learned Gentleman consults the minutes of the Treasury Committee hearing with the Governor of the Bank of England, he will see that he confirmed that a change in target is not likely to be a big factor in setting monetary policy and that the index is a better measure for targeting inflation and for conducting monetary policy. That is why my right hon. Friend the Chancellor has said that, subject to confirmation at the pre-Budget report, he intends to move to that measure.

Low-income Families

Bill O'Brien: What recent measures he has taken to support families on low incomes; and if he will make a statement.

Dawn Primarolo: In April, the Government introduced the working and child tax credits. They build on the success of the working families tax credit and are additional to the real terms increases in child benefit. More than 5.8 million households are already benefiting from the new tax credits, and more than 90 per cent. of the families are expected to benefit in 2003–04.
	As a result of these and other measures introduced since 1997, families with children in the poorest fifth of the population are on average nearly £50 a week better off in real terms.

Bill O'Brien: I thank my right hon. Friend for her reply and congratulate her and her colleagues in the Treasury on their splendid work in helping low income families. Is she aware of an anomaly that applies to the Child Support Agency? When an absent parent starts a second family and receives family tax credit, it is considered as income whereas when the parent with care receives it, it is considered as non-income. Different principles apply to the two examples. Will she have a word with her colleagues in the Department for Work and Pensions to erase the anomaly of an uneven application of family tax credit to those on low incomes?

Dawn Primarolo: If I understand my hon. Friend's point correctly, I must tell him that there is no anomaly in the application of the rules. Parents are responsible for their children under CSA rules, which also provide for payment to be made. Tax credit legislation will not cut across that principle. Responsibility would be diminished if the tax credits compensated for parents paying for it. I shall check the record to ensure that I understood my hon. Friend's point properly. However, it is intended that the tax credits should not cut across parents' responsibility to support their children, as determined by the CSA.

Peter Luff: How does it help families on low incomes to rig the local government financial settlement in such a way as to force county councils such as Worcestershire's to do the Chancellor's dirty work and impose massive stealth taxes through unacceptable increases in council tax?

Dawn Primarolo: As the hon. Gentleman knows, since 1997, when the Government took office, the real terms increase for every council has been greater—some 25 per cent., compared with a decrease of 7 per cent. in the last few years of the Conservative Government. He well knows that the Government's record in supporting the poorest families, for example, through support for child care and ensuring that lone parents can return to work, has contributed to the lives of people in his constituency. The shame is that the Conservative party wants to take all that away.

Insurance Premiums

Lawrie Quinn: If he will make a statement on the impact of insurance premium levels on the service sector of the economy.

Ruth Kelly: I am aware that increases in insurance premiums in the past few years have had an impact on many sectors of the economy, including the service sector.

Lawrie Quinn: My hon. Friend knows that three quarters of the British work force work in the service sector. Does she share my concern that employers' liability insurance is due for much needed reform? Given that the relevant legislation was enacted in 1969, is not it time that she encouraged her colleagues in the Department for Work and Pensions to consider the important subject of insurance?

Ruth Kelly: I know that my hon. Friend takes a great interest in employers' liability insurance. Indeed, he tabled a ten-minute Bill on the matter. Surveys show the importance of developing enforcement procedures to ensure that everybody has compulsory employers' liability insurance in place. We are therefore determined, as part of our review of employers' liability insurance, to develop a comprehensive database to ensure that we have full records of firms' procedures. We are also reviewing the current fines system to ascertain whether legislation or regulation is needed.

Chris Grayling: Is the Minister aware that the situation in regard to employers' liability insurance will be made worse by the Government's latest stealth tax, in the Health and Social Care (Community Health and Standards) Bill, which will allow charging to take place for health care when it is related to a court settlement? Will the Minister work with her colleagues in the Department of Health to ensure that the implementation of this measure does not have the effect—which it could have—of further increasing employers' liability insurance and forcing more businesses closer to the wall?

Ruth Kelly: The hon. Gentleman will be aware that any system of employers' liability insurance needs to be fair to all parties—to employers, to insurers and, of course, to employees who are injured as a result of an employer's negligence. We are aware of the pressure on the system, which is why we have commissioned this wide-ranging review, and it has already come up with many concrete proposals that are improving the situation. We must also ensure that, in future, all legislation is carefully scrutinised to maintain the pressures on the system at a minimum.

Government Investment

Rob Marris: If he will make a statement on planned levels of central Government capital investment in Wolverhampton, South-West in 2003–04.

Paul Boateng: Wolverhampton will benefit from its share of total capital spending by central Government of some £25.2 billion in 2003–04. Investment decisions made by central Departments and regional agencies will be made in accordance with local priorities and the needs of the people of Wolverhampton.

Rob Marris: I am grateful to my right hon. Friend for that answer and for the capital investment that is coming into my constituency to address 18 years of under-investment in capital projects in the 1980s and 1990s. An example of that under-investment is a school about a mile from where I live, which has a flat roof. So much water was standing on that roof that ducks were living on it. Will my right hon. Friend give an indication of what the effect on constituencies such as mine would be if the Conservatives' policy of 20 per cent. cuts were to be put into effect?

Mr. Speaker: Order. That is not the responsibility of the Minister.

Millennium Development Targets

Meg Munn: What recent discussions he has had with African Finance Ministers on debt and the millennium development targets.

Gordon Brown: I have in the last month had meetings with African Finance Ministers in which we promised them that, in return for reform and tackling corruption, the international finance facility could help to ease their debt burden and raise extra billions a year for Africa. The needs of Africa will be at the centre of the UK's G7 presidency in 2005.

Meg Munn: I thank my right hon. Friend for his answer. Did he discuss the millennium development goal of all children having a primary education, and does he agree that that is an important factor for developing countries? The Government have given priority to education in this country, and if developing countries are to have a long-term future the education of their populations is enormously important.

Gordon Brown: I am grateful to my hon. Friend and I thank her for the work that she does in this area. Throughout the world, 120 million children are not going to school today, and most of them are in Africa. A child in Africa has only a one in three chance of completing primary school education. That is why it is urgent that additional funds go to education, why we set up the Commonwealth education fund, why aid to Africa is now rising to £1 billion a year—bilateral aid from the UK Government—and why we need the additional resources that the international finance facility will provide to meet the millennium development goal that every child should have the chance of primary school education.

North Sea Oil and Gas

Bob Blizzard: When he expects to complete the review of North sea oil and gas taxation.

Dawn Primarolo: The consultation on levels of exploration activity in the North sea, which considered whether there were any cost effective measures that could be taken to improve the situation, has now ended. Officials from the Treasury, the Inland Revenue and the Department of Trade and Industry have taken evidence from representatives across the industry which will be considered by a joint working group. The Government will, of course, make announcements on this matter when the review of the items raised in the consultation is completed.

Bob Blizzard: I thank my right hon. Friend for that answer. Does she accept that the oil and gas industry is a major source of employment in many coastal communities such as my constituency? We may be only halfway through our reserves of oil and gas, but what is left is harder to find and involves greater commercial risk. Very few exploration wells have been drilled in recent years. Will my right hon. Friend do everything possible in the review to ensure that a new era of exploration is stimulated to sustain the vital employment in those coastal communities?

Dawn Primarolo: I pay tribute to my hon. Friend, who has done a great deal, in the House and outside it, to raise the important issue of exploration, particularly in the difficult fields. He has also raised many points with my officials and me regarding the east of England economy. The review is looking precisely at this issue, and at whether further assistance can be given. I know that my hon. Friend understands that the Government are involved in a dialogue with the industry, and that he accepts that, before we commit taxpayers' money to further investments to assist the industry, we have to be sure that the return produces the type of results that he suggests. That is precisely what the consultation is addressing.

Business of the House

Eric Forth: May I ask the part-time Leader of the House to give us next week's business?

Peter Hain: The business for next week will be as follows:
	Monday 20 October—Remaining stages of the Courts Bill [Lords].
	Tuesday 21 October—Second reading of the European Parliamentary and Local Elections (Pilots) Bill.
	Wednesday 22 October—Opposition Day [19th Allotted Day]. There will be a debate entitled "The Need for a Judicial Inquiry on Iraq" on an Opposition motion.
	Thursday 23 October—A debate on Defence Procurement on a motion for the Adjournment of the House.
	Friday 24 October—The House will not be sitting.
	The provisional business for the following week will include:
	Monday 27 October—Opposition Day [20th Allotted Day]. There will be a debate on an Opposition motion. Subject to be announced.
	The House will wish to know that the Standing Committee on the Intergovernmental Conference will meet on Monday 20 October at 5pm. Further meetings are scheduled for Monday 10 November and Monday 1 December. Members will also wish to know that at the time of next week's business statement I shall publish the calendar for the next Session.
	I thought it would assist the House if I outlined the Government's intentions in relation to Lord Hutton's report. When the Government receive the report, we shall publish it to Parliament, and ministerial statements will be made by the Prime Minister and the Secretary of State for Constitutional Affairs. The Government will also ensure that both Houses have an opportunity to debate the report once Members have considered its content.

Eric Forth: I am grateful to the part-time Leader of the House, but can he tell us why his prediction of business stops rather mysteriously on Monday week? Is the Government's business now in such complete chaos that the part-time Leader of the House cannot even look that far ahead? Perhaps he will give us an explanation. If he is able to give us the calendar for next year, why can he not give us the calendar for the week after next?
	Has the part-time Leader of the House any plan to change his title to "part-time gaffer"? I say that because a recent headline stated "Hain fails to deliver anti-US speech". I would expect the part-time Leader of the House to want to grant himself a debate in the House, enabling him either to deliver the speeches that he failed to deliver or to tell us why he failed to deliver them. We do not really know his views on the United States, as was reported in the press. Perhaps he could tell us—although that would pre-empt the debate for which I am asking.
	Who drafts the right hon. Gentleman's speeches? Does he read them before he releases them? Does the Foreign and Commonwealth Office block them? We need to know. [Hon. Members: "Why?"] The right hon. Gentleman's parliamentary colleagues are not even interested in what he has to say, and I do not blame them.
	Yesterday the hon. Member for Birmingham, Edgbaston (Ms Stuart) asked the Prime Minister whether he would
	"share with the House his views on what kinds of qualities he will be looking for in those who he wishes to see appointed"
	—to the House of Lords, that is. I thought that a very good, very fair and rather penetrating question, and so I think did the hon. Lady.
	We were rewarded with what I consider to be one of the most revelatory things that the Prime Minister has said in a long time, which will return to haunt him. He replied:
	"So far as Labour Members are concerned, my preference . . . would be for ones who would actually support the Government."—[Official Report, 15 October 2003; Vol. 411, c. 107.]
	If that is not Tony's cronies, I do not know what is. The Prime Minister is saying that he would want to appoint to the House of Lords people who would support the Government. That carries forward to an extent that the Prime Minister may come to regret the debate on House of Lords reform. Therefore, I ask the gaffer: can he please give us an urgent debate on the House of Lords, opened by the Prime Minister, so that we can explore further what is in the Prime Minister's mind in terms of him wanting to appoint Labour cronies and stooges to the House of Lords?

Peter Hain: Well, that was very enjoyable. May I first respond to the right hon. Gentleman's points on the additional information about business after Monday week? It is actually to help him and other right hon. and hon. Members that an advance day is given. Two weeks is not normally announced. Sometimes it is, but it is not an iron rule.
	The right hon. Gentleman talks of chaos. They know all about chaos on the Conservative Benches. During the past couple of days I have been wandering around the corridors of the Commons doing my business as Leader of the House. Indeed, I had a very pleasant meeting with the right hon. Gentleman the other day as part of that business. I see little huddles of Conservative Members in need of counselling. Whenever I appear anywhere near them, their tones become hushed and they give me furtive looks. I think that there is a case for a psychological counsellor for hon. Members because there is serious chaos on the Conservative Benches.
	I see from The Times that the ever loyal right hon. Gentleman has been overheard in the Tea Room
	"loudly complaining that he resented being told when to get up to cheer the leader's speech last week."
	Perhaps he can confirm whether he has had a career development interview with the Whips—indeed, he would not dare—or whether he is one of those condemned by his leader in an interview in The Spectator as being one of the
	"irreconcilable malcontents, the acolytes of former leadership contenders and their friends and allies in the media."
	It would be very welcome if he confirmed that.
	On the question of the United States of America, the media spin that is around is absolutely amazing. If the right hon. Gentleman wants to know my views on the relationship between Britain and the United States or indeed between the European Union and the United States, they are well recorded and I am happy to repeat them now. I believe that it is vital that Europe has a positive partnership with the United States and with the Administration in Washington. It is crucial for the stability of the world. Indeed, it is one of the reasons why I have been completely behind the Prime Minister's recent policies in respect of Iraq and in respect of the alliance with the United States on a number of issues confronting us, including world terrorism. That is my view. It has been my view consistently and the right hon. Gentleman should listen to what I say instead of following the media spin.
	The right hon. Gentleman asked about Lords appointments. Does he not realise that the Labour party has only 28 per cent. of the vote in the House of Lords? Does he really think that that is fair when we have won two landslide majorities? We have fewer than one in three of the votes in the House of Lords. Eighty-nine of the 92 hereditary peers are Conservatives. Therefore, it is important that we address the question of getting a much more representative House of Lords. In that way, the two Chambers can work together in a much more constructive fashion for the future of the people.

Gerald Kaufman: Will my right hon. Friend provide time on an early occasion for a debate in the House on the Israeli plan to build a wall, which will split Bethlehem, prevent access to holy shrines sacred to the Christian, Muslim and Jewish religions, hinder access to the Church of the Nativity and ruin tourism and agriculture in Bethlehem? This matter needs urgent consideration, and I should be grateful if my right hon. Friend would arrange a debate on it.

Peter Hain: I very much agree with the sentiments expressed by my right hon. Friend. The wall is very ill-judged and is completely contrary to international opinion. It will not promote the very reconciliation between Palestinians and Israelis that would give the state of Israel the security that it needs and desperately craves, after attacks from suicide bombers; nor will it give the Palestinians their own independent state. Working together in symmetry and synergy is the objective, and the wall that divides them is very ill-advised. We will consider whether we can find time for an early debate, although I should point out that the Foreign Secretary has been ready to make statements to, and make himself accountable to, the House on middle east policy.

Paul Tyler: My colleagues and I entirely endorse the point made by the right hon. Member for Manchester, Gorton (Mr. Kaufman). On the question of the Lords, was not the Prime Minister's statement completely contrary to Government Front Benchers' claim that the steps intended will take away from No. 10 direct involvement in future membership of the House of Lords? This claim to greater independence for so-called "democratic appointment" is clearly nonsense, and I hope that the Leader of the House will stick to his own view that the only way to make that place more representative and democratic is to have a strong element of elected membership.
	We, too, are disappointed that we are not being given details of the business for the week beyond next. As we understand it, one of the various motions for debate will relate to the payment of Chairs of Select Committees, and I ask the Leader of the House to confirm that that is his intention. Will he also confirm that we will be permitted a wide-ranging debate that will look at the context of that proposal? It is surely important that we think very carefully about career paths other than just Select Committees. For example, there are not many enthusiastic recruits for the Chairman's Panel, and if the purpose is to provide incentives, surely the Chairman's Panel is just as important as Select Committees. Indeed, I wonder whether the right hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Mr. Forth) agrees that the same point applies to membership of the House of Commons Commission. Also, will there be a limit on the term for Select Committee Chairmen? The strong recommendation was made that a deal should be struck, whereby if new patronage is given to Whips on both sides to nominate Select Committee Chairmen, they should be allowed to do so for a limited period only.
	Should we not also look at the value for money that the taxpayer is getting for existing salaries paid to Members of this House who are not Ministers? For example, in the current year, the Conservative Chief Whip is receiving an additional £37,055, presumably to give him the extra expertise to undertake the career development interviews of which we are all aware. [Interruption.] I hope that hon. Members are listening carefully. In addition to his salary, the leader of the Conservative party is getting £65,482 per year, which is very doubtful in terms of value for money. His office—this may be particularly relevant—is getting £548,101 for its running, plus £83,784 for travel.
	It so happens that the leader of the Conservative party is visiting my constituency today, so there is nothing personal in this. Indeed, I am delighted that he is there: after one of his predecessors visited North Cornwall, my majority went up from just under 2,000 to just under 14,000. So I hope that the current Conservative leader is having a very happy day with my constituents, but on a serious point, in the context of the burden on the taxpayer that the Conservatives are always going on about, and their opposition to the state funding of political parties, this is nonsense and complete hypocrisy. May we have a general debate on this issue?

Peter Hain: May I congratulate the hon. Gentleman in that, after the night of the long knives for Liberal Democrat Front Benchers—in which everybody else was reshuffled to the right—he, at least, has stayed true to his principles and kept his job? That is very good news for all of us.
	As the hon. Gentleman well knows, I voted for a 100 per cent. elected House of Lords, and for other options that would still retain a significant elected membership. Unfortunately, there was no consensus in the House of Commons for any of those elected options.
	Let me deal with the point on which the hon. Gentleman seeks to make mischief. The Prime Minister's comments should be viewed in the context of the Labour party's commitment in the manifesto on which it won the last election. Accordingly, non-party members in the House of Lords should be appointed by an independent commission—and I would have thought that the hon. Gentleman would welcome that, so that there could be no question of cronies.
	As to the Senior Salaries Review Board report on the payment of Chairmen of Select Committees and other Committees, I intend to have a debate as early as possible so that consideration can be given to that matter. I also welcome the report published yesterday by the Chairman of the Standards and Privileges Committee. It is an excellent report that will provide us with a way through, and I am sure that the whole House will want to thank him for it. It is an important matter. The hon. Gentleman made valid points about parallel career paths and rewarding Members for taking on positions of seniority and responsibility, and we should view the debate in that context. I shall also lay before the House several other motions in respect of those issues.
	The hon. Gentleman also mentioned the salary paid to the Tory Chief Whip. Let me come to his defence, because he has been very busy recently. If there were provision to claim overtime, I guess that he would have claimed it, so the hon. Gentleman should not knock him too hard. My heart is with the Opposition Chief Whip and all my energy is behind him. He should keep the Leader of the Conservative party in his position because he is doing a great job for the Labour party—and, indeed, for the Liberal Democrats. I am obviously in a charitable mood this afternoon.
	The hon. Gentleman also referred to the salary of the Leader of the Opposition. As he knows, the current position has existed for a long time. The hon. Gentleman's party aspires to be the main Opposition party, so is he telling me that his party would turn the salary down?

David Taylor: Government Members are well aware of the huge improvements in education that have taken place since 1997. Nevertheless, the redistribution formula now in operation has caused some serious difficulties. Surveys this week have highlighted the number of job losses in areas such as mine in Leicestershire. Last week, there was a conference in Lutterworth of the F40 group, which is still seeking significant reforms of the education finance formula. When the most recent figures on the guaranteed formulas that will increase school funding are made available later in 2003, can we have a full-scale parliamentary debate, which would enable us to examine the implications of the improvements planned by the Secretary of State for Education and Skills?

Peter Hain: I am aware of the difficulties in my hon. Friend's constituency of North-West Leicestershire. As he implied, the difficulties there and elsewhere are being dealt with by the Secretary of State—and, indeed, by the Deputy Prime Minister. I am sure that my hon. Friend would not want anyone to forget that, despite those difficulties, we have seen record investment in our schools. The House should be reminded that record investment in schools and education has taken place right across the country and I am sure that the difficulties can be resolved.

Andrew Mitchell: May I draw the attention of the Leader of the House to an important article which appears today in a journal of repute and is written by one of Britain's best-informed journalists, Trevor Kavanagh? He says:
	"Tony Blair is preparing for a dramatic U-turn over a referendum on the new EU Constitution, it emerged last night."
	That is extremely good news. Can the Leader of the House arrange a statement or a debate next week so that the Prime Minister can explain the good news that he is now embracing Conservative policy?

Peter Hain: No, I cannot. The Prime Minister confirmed what he has consistently told the House and what appeared in The Times on 13 October—that he categorically rules out holding a referendum on the EU constitution. [Hon. Members: "Why?"] Because of the status of constitutional treaties ever since, under a Labour Government, we had a referendum to confirm our membership of the EU. If we decide that joining the euro is in Britain's economic interests, we shall, again under a Labour Government, have another referendum. Constitutional treaties are best negotiated by the sovereign source of authority in this country—the House of Commons and Parliament at large. Every constitutional treaty during the past 30 or so years of our membership of the EU has been dealt with in that way. As for the remarks attributed to Sir Stephen Wall—the European policy adviser to the Prime Minister—in the article, I am advised that they do not reflect his views in any shape or form. The position remains the one that the Prime Minister has set out on many occasions, including to this House.

Joan Ruddock: Is my right hon. Friend aware that the publication of the findings of the farm-scale trials today indicates that two genetically modified crops and their treatments were found to be harmful to wildlife and that the third looks good only because it is compared with a conventional crop treated with a chemical that is likely soon to be banned? Given that that follows a science review that was inconclusive, a cost-benefit report that found no economic case and the wholly hostile public debate on the matter, is it not time that the issue of the commercialisation of GM crops is debated in this Chamber? Will he use his best offices to see that this is done as soon as possible?

Peter Hain: I acknowledge the expert interest and attention that my hon. Friend has given to this issue, which is welcome. She referred to the publication of the farm-scale evaluations and the achievement that that presents. It is the biggest ecological study ever undertaken of the effect of any farming practice and the Government should be commended for having such an independent study. We need some time to consider the matter, but I will certainly consider seriously her request for such a debate.

John Horam: Will the Leader of the House consider seriously allocating time to a debate on the Government's policies on transport? He will have seen the excellent report produced by the Transport Committee this week, which pointed out that overcrowding, especially in the London commuter area, is seriously damaging commuters' health. The companies in question are also underestimating, in the statistics they publish, the true extent of overcrowding, which we have long suspected. The regulator is in discussions with the Secretary of State for Transport about allocating a further £1.5 billion to railway maintenance, and we also need to know more about that.

Peter Hain: I am aware of the Committee's report and it needs to be studied carefully. Nobody is in any doubt that improvements are needed in our transport system. The difference between what the Labour Government are doing and what was done under the Conservatives is that whereas they cut support for railways, buses and public transport in general, so that we inherited a dreadful legacy—as everybody knows—of a bodged rail privatisation programme, we are investing £180 billion in a 10-year plan to improve our transport system. Some 1,500 new trains have come into service since we were elected and rail passenger journeys have risen by 20 per cent. since 1997. We are seeing increasing use of our rail services, but the quality of life for rail travellers needs to be improved, as any of us who have used the underground or main line rail services know.

David Winnick: Will there be an opportunity to discuss in the House the proposed state identity card scheme? If the Cabinet discusses the matter, I hope that the House will also be able to do so. Any such debate should be before the Queen's Speech, just in case any such proposal were included in it. I would have no difficulty in collecting many more than 25 signatures from the parliamentary party opposing any such scheme.

Peter Hain: There are strong feelings on both sides about this issue and it is a matter that the Government are considering and debating. The issues are complex—

John Bercow: What is your view?

Peter Hain: If the hon. Gentleman gives me a moment, I shall tell him. Virtually all of us carry ID of some kind around with us. The development of driving licences and passports points in the direction of an identity card, and any such scheme should be considered in that context, including the issue of biometric data. As to whether it should be compulsory and how it should be funded, the Home Secretary and the Cabinet are considering those issues and will continue to do so. If there is an opportunity to consult the House on the matter, we will of course do so.

George Young: I am grateful to the Leader of the House for his kind remarks about my Committee's latest report. When will we have a date for the pre-Budget statement? It is normally in early November, but it is not even on the horizon at the moment. Why has it been delayed? When we have the statement, may we then have a debate in Government time on the economy?

Peter Hain: I am discussing with my right hon. Friend the Chancellor of the Exchequer the timing of the pre-Budget statement. Of course, the Queen's Speech is late this year and the statement needs to be sequenced around that. As soon as I am in a position to give the right hon. Gentleman and the House notice of the statement, I shall do so.

Clive Betts: I am sure that my right hon. Friend is aware of the excellent legislation that the House recently passed to restrict the sale and use of fireworks. At a meeting in Tinsley in my constituency the other night, more than 100 people complained about the continuing misuse of fireworks, especially the large airbombs, which are little more than dangerous explosives. Will my right hon. Friend therefore ensure that the regulations to implement the legislation are introduced to the House as quickly as possible before—as Superintendent Brennan said to me the other night—someone is killed? We need to ban the sale and use of such fireworks as soon as we can.

Peter Hain: I welcome my hon. Friend's intervention and I will ensure that the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry is made aware of it. As he knows, the Fireworks Act 2003 has now been enacted, but the regulations need to be introduced. I have experience of the concerns of many of my constituents about the problem. Some of the modern fireworks are extremely powerful and noisy, and they can frighten people. We need to get a grip on the problem.

Alex Salmond: In the debate next week on the independent judicial inquiry into the causes of war with Iraq, will the Prime Minister open for the Government? If we take, for example, the charges by the right hon. Member for Livingston (Mr. Cook), a former Leader of the House, that the Prime Minister was aware, at the point of going to war, that Iraq did not present an immediate strategic threat, only the Prime Minister can tell us whether that is true. If the Prime Minister is not prepared to submit himself to an independent judicial inquiry, surely he has an obligation to submit himself to parliamentary scrutiny, so we can find out whether he is telling the truth.

Peter Hain: The Prime Minister has submitted himself to parliamentary scrutiny and been accountable to this House, including to the right hon. Gentleman, more consistently than any Prime Minister on any previous issue of military intervention abroad. That point is simply nonsense. As for the future, the Hutton inquiry is deliberating at the moment and will report in due course. I have also just announced that we will have a statement immediately following its publication and I would have thought that that would be the proper opportunity. In respect of what my predecessor said in his book, the Prime Minister has categorically refuted that version and the right hon. Gentleman should respect that.

Alan Simpson: May I press the case for a statement on GM crop trial results that have been published today and for an opportunity for the House to debate and vote on the question of commercialisation of GM crops? Given that of the three trials two were disadvantageous to the case for GM crops and the other, on maize, was invalidated because of its dependence on a carcinogenic herbicide, and given that the public do not want to eat GM crops, the farmers do not want to grow them and supermarkets do not want to sell them, is not it time that Parliament had the opportunity to take the side of those who are campaigning for safe food supply rather than the corporations who seek to take ownership of the food chain?

Peter Hain: As I said a moment ago, it is important that the Government and the House have a chance to study the findings of this thorough investigation. I am very sympathetic to the idea of a debate on the matter, about which there is much concern, both inside the House and outside it. A debate at some point in the future will be much more informed as a result of this investigation.

John Bercow: Will the Leader of the House use his prerogative to arrange a debate on taxation in which he can take part? The Government have been busy plundering the pockets of the people for the past six and a half years, but the input of higher taxation has not been matched by the output of improved public services. Would not such a debate allow us to discover whether the Leader of the House still believes that higher taxes are the answer, or whether he now understands, after six and a half years, that without real reform in the method of delivering public services the Government will continue to betray the patients, parents and passengers of this country, as they have done consistently?

Peter Hain: I shall respond to the hon. Gentleman's questions about taxation in a moment, but he mentioned patients. His party's policy is to rob the NHS of £2 billion and to allow patients with the ability to top up the cost of operations to steal money from the NHS. Nurses, doctors and consultants would be sacked in the process, and the money would be diverted into private hospitals. That is a very dangerous policy for this country's patients. The Government put an extra 1p on national insurance contributions—the increment applied right up the income scale, and was not cut off at the normal level—to raise £8 billion for investment in the NHS, education and the public services generally. The Opposition are committed to cutting investment by 20 per cent. We have introduced a fair tax system. If there is an opportunity to discuss our tax policies—in an Opposition day debate, or in a debate that we might call for that purpose—we will defend our low, 10p, starting-rate tax for the very lowest taxpayers. We will also defend the way in which we have brought down the basic rate of tax, and the way in which we have introduced an even fairer tax system through tax credits. That compares with the unfair tax system and the continuous rises imposed by the previous Tory Government.

Helen Jones: Given the continuing concern about obesity and poor diet among young children, and the predominance of fat and sugar in their diets, will my right hon. Friend arrange for a debate on school meals provision and the role that it plays in promoting good health and healthy eating among young people? Does he accept that serving cheap and poor-quality food to young children may appear to save money, but it has long-term high costs in terms of poor health and educational attainment? Does he agree that the House should have the chance to debate the matter, so that we can have a proper, joined-up policy on this issue?

Peter Hain: I hope that there will be an opportunity to discuss the matter, and remind my hon. Friend that she can apply for a debate on it. I agree that the matter of school diets and the food that youngsters eat in general is very important. We are what we eat. We are as healthy—or unhealthy—as the food that we take in. It is important to address this matter. My hon. Friend's intervention, and the Government's approach, will help that to happen.

David Heath: Will the Leader of the House arrange for an urgent debate on the parlous state of the diary farming industry? Many farmers are finding it almost impossible to carry on their businesses because of the unsustainably low price of milk. The only people to benefit are the owners of the large supermarkets. Farmers in my constituency believe that the Government do not care and that Parliament has lost interest: will the right hon. Gentleman prove them wrong?

Peter Hain: The idea that the Government do not care about farming or rural areas is defied by the facts. We have invested much more support for rural communities than any previous Government. However, in respect of the hon. Gentleman's specific request, I shall certainly draw the matter to the attention of my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.

Dennis Skinner: Will my right hon. Friend look into the question of the transfer of housing stock by some local authorities? Perhaps he can give me an off-the-cuff answer today. If an authority decides, as a matter of principle, to retain its council houses rather than sell them off, surely it should not be penalised financially?

Peter Hain: I am with my hon. Friend in spirit on this matter, as I always am. One of the difficult problems inherited by this Government was the relatively small amount of social housing as a result of the policies pursued by the previous Conservative Government. We have endorsed the important right of people to buy their council houses, but my hon. Friend raises an important point, and I shall ensure that my right hon. Friend the Deputy Prime Minister is made aware of it.

Graham Brady: My constituent Mr. Peach faxed me this morning to say that police last night apparently visited the Bull's Head pub in Mobberley. They were not looking for drugs or guns, but wanted to inform patrons that it would in future be illegal to hold traditional music sessions there. Can we have an urgent debate or statement next week on the implementation of the new music licensing regime? When the new licensing legislation was being considered, Ministers assured the House that there would not be absurd and excessive regulation in its implementation, but there are worrying signs that the absurdities that we feared are taking place. If that is happening, we need a debate to stop it going any further.

Peter Hain: The Government are not in favour of absurd regulations on this matter. The hon. Gentleman knows that the issue was carefully and thoroughly debated in Standing Committee. However, I shall certainly refer the episode that he describes to my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport. I have no reason to doubt that the facts are as he described, so it is obviously a matter for concern.

Harry Barnes: My hon. Friend and constituency neighbour the hon. Member for Sheffield, Attercliffe (Mr. Betts) asked about fireworks abuse and said that the Fireworks Act 2003 needs to be implemented. That might take a while, but the Department of Trade and Industry can still stress that the existing law allows the police, environmental health and trading standards officers, and bodies such as the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals to act. Those official organisations should not argue that they must wait for the new legislation to be implemented before they can do anything. They should be proactive and co-ordinate their activities. We are waiting for a statement on the matter from the Department, but does my right hon. Friend agree that it would be useful if it were to make an earlier statement to the effect that that is how those bodies ought to act?

Peter Hain: My hon. Friend makes a powerful and convincing point, which I shall draw to the attention of my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry. I know that she is as concerned as any hon. Member about how the problem has escalated.

Paul Goodman: May we have an urgent debate on the euro to clear up confusion about an incident reported by the right hon. Member for Livingston (Mr. Cook), the former Leader of the House, in his memoirs? An extract from those memoirs carried by The Sunday Times stated that the Prime Minister laughed and said:
	"'Even the Treasury officials can't find out what's going on over the economic assessment, never mind us here at No. 10'".
	Can the Leader of the House clear up the confusion?

Peter Hain: There is no confusion. The conclusion of the economic assessment was announced on 9 June. My right hon. Friend the Chancellor of the Exchequer came to the House burdened by 20 studies of the matter in the end. Along with other Cabinet Ministers, I had to read them all. It was the most thorough economic assessment of the euro ever undertaken by this or any other Government. I do not understand how it can be claimed that there was confusion over the matter. The process was completely transparent, very detailed and very thorough.

John McDonnell: The Government still intend to publish the White Paper on airport capacity before Christmas, but some malevolent forces are suggesting that there might not be adequate time for debate. Will my right hon. Friend assure me that the House will be informed of the Government's proposals first and before all others, and that there will be adequate time for debate and for questioning my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Transport on the proposals?

Peter Hain: First, I acknowledge that my hon. Friend has a direct constituency interest in this matter in respect of Heathrow. However, I am sure that my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Transport will want to inform the House about these important matters first, and that he will want to be questioned by and accountable to the House on this important matter. I am sure that my hon. Friend will have the opportunity to express his constituents' views in those discussions.

Jim Sheridan: My right hon. Friend may be aware of early-day motion 1731.
	[That this House congratulates the Scottish Sunday Herald in exposing the so-called dead peasants insurance scheme where employers can take out life insurance for their employees without their knowledge or consent and then cash in this policy when the employee dies; and calls on the Government to introduce effective legislation to outlaw this dishonest practice.]
	I seek an assurance from my right hon. Friend that he will use his extensive influence with the appropriate Minister to carry out an inquiry into the extent of that bad practice and, if necessary, implement effective legislation that will protect British workers from it.

Peter Hain: Obviously, my hon. Friend has raised an issue that deserves consideration and I will certainly ensure that my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry considers it.

Kevin Brennan: On the new 118 directory inquiries, has my right hon. Friend, like me, had occasion to use one of those so-called services only to be told that he can be put through to the number without being informed that there is a charge for that part of the service? Is that not a complete rip-off? Is it not an example of public service where the choice is not necessarily better for the consumer? The only winners in this case seem to be rip-off telecommunications companies, advertising agencies and, perhaps, if he wins his case, David Bedford the superannuated long distance runner.

Peter Hain: Obviously, that matter has excited a great deal of concern in my hon. Friend and others. We will need to look into it.

David Drew: Further to the matter raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Bolsover (Mr. Skinner), Stroud district council is engaged in a ballot on large-scale voluntary transfers, which I oppose. Despite the huge sums of money that are being put in by those who are encouraging the sell-off, the group in charge—it is not a Labour group, I am pleased to say—has passed a protocol whereby all councillors are banned from putting out any information. Those councillors who do not agree have made their views known and the Audit Commission has been brought in to decide whether they are meeting the terms of the protocol. That is an abuse of the role of the Audit Commission. Will my right hon. Friend talk to the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister to look at the way in which the ballots are taking place and, more particularly, into how the Audit Commission, which should have no role in this, is being used? Will he comment on that?

Peter Hain: My hon. Friend has raised some serious matters. Having visited his constituency a few years ago with him, I know of his concern and also that of my hon. Friend the Member for Bolsover (Mr. Skinner). There is an opportunity to table questions to the Deputy Prime Minister today. Perhaps he might avail himself of that opportunity.

John Cryer: Has my right hon. Friend seen early-day motion 1751 in my name and 10 hon. Friends'?
	[That this House calls on the Government to bring the Royal Mail management into talks with the Communication Workers Union on the issue of London Weighting.]
	It concerns the refusal of the Royal Mail management to come to the negotiating table to negotiate with the Communication Workers Union in the dispute over London weighting, which has led to the present strike. I was on the picket line in Hornchurch and Rainham this morning. May we have a debate or at least a statement on the dispute? That would enable the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry to tell us from the Dispatch Box why she has not as yet ordered the senior management of Royal Mail to go to the negotiating table and why she continues to allow senior managers to provoke the CWU and engage in a campaign that I think is aimed at eventually breaking the union, which represents employees who earn as little as £13,000 a year?

Peter Hain: The Government do not want to see the union broken, if that is the objective of anyone concerned. It is important that post office workers—Royal Mail workers in particular—are properly represented and have a right to put their case, especially given the high living costs in London. I am sure that he will agree that the end result of the dispute must be a negotiated settlement—a fair settlement, but one that can be financed. We must continue to work for that.

David Cairns: Has my right hon. Friend had the opportunity to read the reported remarks of the Malaysian Prime Minister, Mahathir Mohamad, who yesterday called on Moslems to use brains as well as brawn to fight Jews who "rule the world". He is alleged to have said,
	"The Europeans killed six million Jews out of 12 million. But today the Jews rule this world by proxy . . . They are already beginning to make mistakes. And they will make more mistakes. There may be windows of opportunity for us now and in the future. We must seize these opportunities".
	Will my right hon. Friend join me in condemning those remarks as dangerous nonsense? Does it not highlight the need for an urgent debate on the rise in global anti-Semitism. The last time that we witnessed a rise on this scale it had disastrous consequences.

Peter Hain: Like my hon. Friend I cannot understand how that statement came to be made. We should all focus on getting greater understanding and reconciliation between all faiths, especially between Jews and Moslems who live side by side in the middle east. Their future is in coming together as a community rather than being divided. Such statements do not help.

David Chaytor: The Leader of the House will know that today in the north of England there are two significant local council by-elections in which candidates with explicitly racist platforms are standing for election. Interestingly, the Conservative party cannot even field a candidate in one of those elections—it is a shame that more Conservative Back Benchers are not here to hear that news. I am sure that my right hon. Friend will agree that whatever the outcome of those by-elections this is an issue that can no longer be swept under the carpet. This House should be debating vigorously the reasons for the reappearance of political parties with neo-Nazi and fascist views. We should be looking at the social and economic conditions that give rise to that phenomenon in certain parts of the country. Will he find time for a debate on that matter in the near future?

Peter Hain: I will certainly consider the opportunity for such a debate. As one of the founders of the Anti Nazi League in 1977, when that problem was last rampant, I share his sentiments exactly. It is crucial that we confront the racists and the Nazis wherever they appear, and that, when they stand candidates in elections, political parties campaign against them to expose their racism and neo-Nazism. Otherwise, there is a great danger of divisions being opened up and of spreading prejudice and racism.

Defence Policy

[Relevant documents: The Sixth Report from the Defence committee of Session 2002–03, A New Chapter to the Strategic Defence Review (HC93-I and II) and the Government's Response thereto, Third Special Report, Session 2002–03, HC 975.]
	Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.—[Paul Clark.]

Geoff Hoon: This is the first of two debates on defence just one week apart. Today's debate focuses on defence policy. Next week's will look in more detail at equipment procurement. I recognise that equipment issues cannot be separated neatly from policy matters, but I want to draw a distinction between them for the purposes of these two debates. Right hon. and hon. Members will have an opportunity to examine current equipment issues in detail on 23 October.
	Today, I shall give the House an overview of the policy changes driving work at the heart of the Ministry of Defence. I shall explain what those changes are and why they are necessary. In defence, policy changes have usually been gradual. Indeed, defence saw a remarkable continuity and consistency of policy certainly in the years from the end of the second world war to the end of the cold war. However, defence policy can never be static. Historically, there are periods when major and rapid changes are necessary. That reflects the emergence of new threats and requirements and the passing of former threats against which the armed forces have previously been configured.
	Britain's armed forces have always been prepared to face up to change. That is a key reason why they have continually been among the best in the world and have punched above their weight for decades. We are in a period of rapid change again now. It requires new thinking and reform to ensure that our armed forces can continue to respond to the changing strategic environment in which they must operate.
	The challenge for the Ministry of Defence and for the armed forces in recent years has been to ensure that their planning and assumptions for the future reflect the changes begun by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the military threat it posed. Fifteen years or so ago, we were used to assessing our military capability in terms of a numbers game, whether it was tanks, fighter aircraft, destroyers or frigates. There has been continuing and sometimes rapid change since, much of it at the time difficult and controversial. That was especially true of some of the major reductions in force structures across all three services in the early 1990s. Hundreds of tanks, all our conventional submarines and nearly 150 front-line combat aircraft were withdrawn during that period.
	Ageing Chieftain tanks could not meet the logistical and environmental demands of deployed operations outside western Europe. We could barely support two armoured divisions in Germany. The large armoured force on the Rhine was a costly liability in the post-cold war period, not the basis for an expeditionary army. The conventional submarine force, useful though it had been in the Falklands and the Gulf, was primarily designed to help plug the north Atlantic gap against Soviet submarines. The boats were not suitable for rapid reaction operations at far distances, so, in the early 1990s, they had to go. So, too, in 1992 did the Phantoms and, in 1994, the Buccaneers that provided air defence against a threat from massed Soviet bombers.
	Much of what was done during that period was retrenchment. The new systems that came into service during the 1990s, and those that were retained, were inspired by the cold war but adaptable for the new environment although they were not always optimised for it: aircraft carriers that were smaller than needed for significant operations against targets ashore; armoured forces that, although leaner, more modern and more easily supported, could deploy only slowly, by sea; and combat aircraft that were too specialised in single roles and lacked either the precision weapons to hit targets with minimal collateral damage or access to a network to find targets in unfamiliar environments.
	The choices that faced defence were stark. Change was needed, not only to deliver a peace dividend but also to ensure that continuing capabilities were useful in a new strategic environment. The demands to use those capabilities were very real. Our armed forces became engaged quite suddenly in a series of expeditionary operations in the Gulf and the Balkans. Changes in force structure were opposed by some and questioned by many more, yet what seemed impossible or controversial then is today largely taken for granted as being self-evidently correct.
	The 1998 strategic defence review did not conclude that process of change; rather it gave it a clear policy basis, setting our armed forces clear tasks and capability goals and moving them all firmly into the expeditionary era. Our forces now have far fewer tanks, fast jets and naval escorts than they did a decade or more ago, but they are significantly better organised, trained and equipped for expeditionary operations. That reflects decisions to invest heavily in the less glamorous capabilities that give our forces strategic reach and enable them to deliver effect when they get to a crisis.

John Smith: Does my right hon. Friend agree that that point was proven during the recent Iraq conflict when we were able to deploy a larger British force in half the time that it took 10 years ago?

Geoff Hoon: My hon. Friend is right. That is why we must anticipate the need for those capabilities, as I shall set out in more detail in a moment. I certainly agree with his observation.
	Among the less glamorous capabilities in which we have invested in recent times are ro-ro shipping, C-17 heavy-lift aircraft and all-weather precision munitions. They have all been brought into service as a result of the philosophy set out in the SDR.
	That process of change cannot stop. Technologies and capabilities move on—whether ours, or those of our allies or our potential enemies. The security environment continues to evolve; old threats recede further or disappear, newer ones become more real and more dangerous. Inevitably, much of the current capability of our armed forces still reflects the position in the immediate post-cold war era rather than the demands of the future. Further radical change is needed and, as before, we must think ahead and not look back.
	Thinking and planning ahead is crucial. I take this opportunity to express my thanks to the men and women, both military and civilian, in the Ministry of Defence who undertake that work. Without their expertise and professionalism, our armed forces would not be able to operate to the high standards that we have come to expect. They may not always be visible, but their work makes a major contribution to every operation we undertake.
	However, although good planning can help us to anticipate many changes, the nature of emerging threats and the fast pace of geopolitical change mean that we will not always be able to predict precisely the challenges that we shall face. The events of 11 September 2001 exemplified the new threats to nations right across the globe, obviously including the United Kingdom. I commissioned a new chapter to the strategic defence review to ensure that our thinking took those new threats into account.

Llew Smith: On planning, the Government announced about £2 billion extra for the upgrading of Aldermaston, yet in almost the same breath they said that they were not going to upgrade or replace Trident. If that is the case, will my right hon. Friend outline what role there is for Aldermaston?

Geoff Hoon: I have announced no specific decisions on Trident. The Government's nuclear policy has not changed. Obviously, it is important that we retain that capability while it fulfils an important function in Britain's defence policy, but there have been no significant adjustments in that policy and I invite my hon. Friend to look at the various announcements that we have made on that matter. There is no significant change to Britain's policy on those questions.
	The results of the new policy work that the Ministry of Defence has undertaken in the last year, together with further work flowing from the new chapter, will be brought together in a defence White Paper that I intend to publish later this year.
	Since the publication of the new chapter, our armed forces have undertaken major operations in Iraq. They have faced, and continue to face, difficult challenges. Like a number of right hon. and hon. Members, I attended the service of remembrance here in London last week. I know that all Members of the House will wish to join me once again in expressing our sympathy to the families of those servicemen who lost their lives.
	The stark reality of those operations and the courage and dedication of the people undertaking them should remind us all why the issues that we are discussing today matter so much. The policies that we are developing are aimed at giving British servicemen and women the best possible levels of support.

Gavin Strang: Will my right hon. Friend consider a policy of replacing the US-led coalition forces, which are occupying Iraq, with a United Nations force? In that context, may I put it to him that the sooner all the coalition forces in Iraq are replaced by the military of other nations the sooner we shall achieve stability in that country?

Geoff Hoon: My right hon. Friend knows the Government's position. There have been extensive discussions in the UN Security Council, and earlier today it was my understanding that they are likely to lead to the agreement of a further Security Council resolution. Clearly, it is important to the Government that we move to a position where ultimately and, we hope, quickly the Iraqis will be responsible for their own affairs, but at this stage, given continuing instability in Iraq, it is also important that the coalition forces continue their excellent work. Assuming that the Security Council resolution is agreed this afternoon—our time—we shall continue to discuss further steps that will lead to the greater involvement of the international community. However, at this stage, I cannot go as far as my right hon. Friend is urging the Government.
	We are planning to deal with the new threats that we face, but in doing so we must ensure that the changes that we make are driven by operational and strategic needs. We will not make changes for their own sake; nevertheless, there will be difficult choices to be made, and we will have to be frank in our assessment of capabilities that no longer meet the same needs that they once did.
	There can be no doubt about the achievements of our armed forces. They have never been content to rest on their laurels. They have been prepared to take sometimes difficult decisions to change to meet their future needs.

Angus Robertson: Can the Secretary of State tell the House the Government's intentions on confirming the future of the defence fire service? I understand that an announcement was scheduled for this month. When will the House be informed about when a decision will be made?

Geoff Hoon: As the hon. Gentleman knows, that work is under way and no specific decisions have yet been taken. I assure him and other hon. Members that the House will be informed as soon as decisions are reached.
	Our planning draws on the preliminary lessons that we have learned from recent operations in Iraq but also from operations in many other parts of the world that have not necessarily received the same media focus in recent months. We must not be seduced into the old error of planning to fight the last war; there is a clear contrast between the operations that we have undertaken in Afghanistan and those in Iraq, just 18 months apart, yet both involving the same set of military capabilities. Let me therefore try to set out broadly the kind of world in which we believe our armed forces will be operating, after which I will look at the concepts, force structures, processes and, most important, the people whom we will need to deal with that world.
	At the broad strategic level, we can see certain trends. Continuing globalisation is likely to mean that the United Kingdom becomes even more open as a society and even more dependent on broad stability elsewhere in the world, especially with key trading partners in the European Union, the United States and, increasingly, Asia. Conflict between states is likely to become rarer—certainly in the United Kingdom's key areas of interest—but at the same time other threats will develop.
	Countering weapons proliferation and confronting the threat of terrorism will continue to occupy much of the armed forces' effort. The nature of asymmetric conflict and the readiness of certain groups to source and deploy weapons of mass destruction against us and our interests will require a flexible, fast-moving and, usually, multilateral response. There is also a danger that, in the next 30 years, new WMD powers may emerge, as the technology proliferates and technical advances make production easier.
	In responding to those challenges, we must recognise that the treatment of those issues is not exclusively or indeed even primarily military, but, to the extent that a military response is involved, is best managed through alliances, partnerships and co-operation.
	NATO and the European Union, in their differing but mutually supportive contributions to our security, will continue to occupy key positions in our planning. NATO will remain the basis for our collective defence, for crisis management in the Euro-Atlantic area and for facing together new threats to our security. NATO, too, is adapting to meet those threats. For example, the new NATO response force was inaugurated yesterday.

Bernard Jenkin: Sometimes the Government say that NATO is the cornerstone of our defence. The last Queen's Speech said that NATO is the cornerstone of our security. Sometimes the Government draw a distinction between the defence role of NATO and the security tasks of the EU. May we make it absolutely clear that NATO is the cornerstone of our security in its widest sense and that, if there is to be a superior alliance in European security, it has to be NATO? That is what the Foreign Secretary has said previously.

Geoff Hoon: I entirely agree with the hon. Gentleman, but I cannot help noticing that, as soon as I mentioned the phrase "European Union", he leapt to his feet—something that I have observed over a number of years in these fascinating debates. I have no difficulty in emphasising NATO's importance as the basis of our collective defence and security if that helps the hon. Gentleman in his difficulty.
	That multilateral future will make it imperative that our forces are able to interoperate with those of other countries. Most importantly, it is highly unlikely that the United Kingdom would be engaged in large-scale combat operations without the United States. That judgment is born of experience, shared interests and our assessment of strategic trends.
	That all means that we must build more flexible and more rapidly deployable forces that can quickly link themselves with those of our allies. We will do that by harnessing technology and enhancing capabilities, rather than through more platforms. It will also involve investing in the people who use them.

Gisela Stuart: I suppose that I am also guilty of jumping up every time that I hear the word "Europe".
	In the context of capabilities, I hope that my right hon. Friend will say a bit more, first, about co-operation between NATO and the EU—not least about the expressed concerns of the United States about our agreeing to precise terms of the Convention on the Future of Europe—and, secondly, about developing capability so that the European reaction force and a NATO reaction force will draw on the same resources.

Geoff Hoon: I am grateful to my hon. Friend for making that point. In the past 10 days, I have had a meeting of Defence Ministers in NATO and a meeting of Defence Ministers in the EU. There was absolute agreement among Ministers at both meetings not only about the importance of the relationship between NATO and the EU, but the importance of developing capabilities—whether for use by NATO as an alliance or for use in autonomous operations by the EU, or indeed for use by individual nations. My hon. Friend and I absolutely agree about that important relationship, on which the Government will continue to focus.

Crispin Blunt: Will the Secretary of State say something about the Government's attitude to our European partners beginning, in effect, to start to merge their armed forces to provide greater flexibility for their rather limited budgets? What will be our attitude if they start to merge their armed forces so that they have some form of single executive direction?

Geoff Hoon: Our emphasis has always been on improving our European partners' military capabilities. The way in which they do so is obviously a matter for them, but I have emphasised today the importance of interoperability. If certain countries chose to pool their resources—for example, to produce a capability that would not otherwise be available—that would be a wholly sensible approach that we would welcome, although, clearly, it would depend on the capability being useful and available. I do not advocate merging forces for the sake of it, but if two countries can join together to fill a capability gap—the process that we considered as part of the Helsinki headline goal target—that would not otherwise be filled, that seems a very sensible and welcome approach.
	We need armed forces that are capable of doing their job in that new environment, rather than those that might look impressive in what I might describe as Soviet-style parades. There are those, such as the hon. Member for North Essex (Mr. Jenkin), who count quite a lot and might see themselves as the new "Bernard" Brezhnev, counting tanks and missile launchers as they rumble past. The reality is that our forces will need the ability to reconfigure forces and equipment rapidly to deliver critical effect at the right moment. That is what will determine success.
	We are now able to bring force to bear with ever-greater precision, from a wide variety of platforms, to attack and reduce the combat power of an adversary. The astonishing speed with which we can increasingly operate can destabilise an adversary and achieve decisive effect, causing the enemy to give up even though many of its military forces may still remain—what we call effects-based operations, which focus on undermining an opponent's ability to exercise effective command and control of its forces, rather than simply on battlefield attrition. Effects-based operations are not new—just as asymmetric warfare pre-dated the events of 11 September 2001—but a process is being developed that provides a better understanding of what effects we might be able to achieve and how best we might achieve them.

Patrick Mercer: I take the right hon. Gentleman's point about Mr. Brezhnev's bean-counting approach and I welcome his comments about radical thinking and not wishing to fight the last war again, but everything he has said involves conventional forces, expeditionary warfare and engaging enemies on the battlefield: not once has he talked about homeland defence and the integration of armed forces and civil forces that will be so necessary in asymmetric warfare.

Geoff Hoon: I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for raising that issue. I do not overlook that important aspect of defence policy. We dealt with it in some detail in the new chapter, and we have continued to develop it in the work that flows from the new chapter, especially in respect of augmenting our reserve forces to allow a rapid response internationally and domestically. I entirely agree that, in the new environment following the end of the Soviet Union's threat to the United Kingdom, we must pay significant attention to the threats to the United Kingdom, perhaps in a way that had not been thought necessary in a previous generation. We certainly take such things fully into account.
	People are at the heart of effects-based operations. The continuing trend towards expeditionary and multinational deployments will have an enormous impact on the skills required of service personnel in the coming years and on the way in which we train them to apply those skills to the tactical situations in which they operate.
	Experience tells us that, for many military assets, such as deployed headquarters and logistical support, conducting several smaller scale operations is more demanding than one or two larger operations. Frequent and often concurrent medium and small-scale operations have been the exact pattern since the strategic defence review, with a new operation arising on average about once a year. While we must therefore retain the capacity to undertake the most demanding large-scale operations as part of a coalition, it has become clear that we need to structure our forces with a focus on the more frequent demands of concurrent medium and small-scale operations.
	The operational burden is not falling evenly across the range of capabilities. The recent pattern of operations, and of those that we foresee in the future, place extra strain on certain of our forces—the elements that act as multipliers of combat power by enabling more rapid manoeuvre, more rapid deployment, better intelligence and target acquisition, greater accuracy and, therefore, the ability to undertake operations more quickly and at lower cost in life and matériel. We must therefore look hard at whether we have enough of those kinds of forces
	The size and shape of each of the services will need to evolve to optimise joint operations and provide greater flexibility and capability to project power. In the case of the Army, experience demonstrates that our current light forces cannot provide the combat power required by some of the more demanding operations in which rapid deployment is needed, so we must move from the current mix of light and heavy forces, representing the two extremes of deployability and combat power, to a more graduated and balanced structure of light, medium and heavy forces together with a greater emphasis on enabling capabilities such as logistics, engineers and intelligence. That will lead inevitably to a different requirement over time for main battle tanks, other heavy armoured fighting vehicles and heavy artillery, offset by a new requirement for more medium-weight forces based on the future rapid effects system family of vehicles.
	We are currently engaged in the Royal Navy's largest shipbuilding programme for many years. With two new aircraft carriers, Type 45 destroyers, Astute class submarines, new amphibious shipping and Royal Fleet Auxiliary support vessels, we are optimising the fleet for joint operations. Some of our older vessels contribute less well to the pattern of operations that we envisage, and some adjustments are likely to be needed.
	With the introduction of Typhoon, the Royal Air Force will enjoy a significant margin of advantage in air warfare over any potential opponent for the foreseeable future. The emphasis of air power will shift from dedicated air defence aircraft such as the Tornado F3 to multi-role platforms equipped with precision-guided weapons and enhanced sensors.
	On a wider front, enhancing the armed forces' ability to respond to change means changing the way in which we support them, which will place a premium at all levels on flexibility, innovation and improved systems and processes.
	We are engaged in a process of essential change that will lead to the introduction of new technologies and practices into the armed forces. That has always been an essential part of our long-term planning. As in the past, it also means that, inevitably, the new capabilities replace old ones. Those who suggest that this significant modernisation and adaptation of our armed forces is somehow a cuts exercise to score political points are at best mischievous and at worst risk damaging the morale of our servicemen and women.
	We have a responsibility to provide our people with the equipment to carry out the tasks that we currently ask of them. The Spitfire played a crucial role in winning the battle of Britain, but as the jet age opened it was obsolete by 1950. The same is true today of many of the technologies and practices that were designed to meet the threats of the cold war. When we dispense with unnecessary capabilities, it is because they no longer meet the requirements of our modern armed forces.

James Gray: The Secretary of State accuses some of his detractors of making political capital out of suggesting that some of the things that he has described, many of which we endorse entirely, are driven by Treasury cuts. Will he therefore be happy to give us an absolute assurance that, five years from now, under his Government, our forces will be of the same strength and defence spending will be at the same level or at higher levels than today?

Geoff Hoon: The whole point of what I have been setting out to the House is to emphasise that our armed forces are better trained, better organised and better equipped than they have ever been in our history. I expect that, under this Government, that process will continue.
	We need to use the resources we have to provide the best support to our armed forces. That is why the Ministry of Defence undertakes what amounts to a capabilities stocktake every year against our future plans. We examine the systems that we have, those that we have chosen to purchase and those that we may need in the future. The strategic environment changes rapidly, and we must make sure that our planning evolves with those changes. Like all Departments, the Ministry of Defence has only so much money to spend, and it must spend it effectively.
	All Departments must also deal with fluctuating financial pressures and live within their budgets: the Ministry of Defence is no exception. Sometimes we have to pay a price for our success. For example, recruitment has been more successful this year than we had anticipated. That is good news, but it also affects the demands on the budget. We also have to manage significant exchange rate fluctuations, and this year there is the added complication of managing the impact of operating full resource accounting and budgeting for the first time. That may require some adjustments. The details are still being worked through, but they will not affect our overall strategic direction.

Patrick Mercer: If recruitment has been so successful this year, albeit that the Army in particular remains far behind its overall recruitment targets, why has it been capped for the next financial year?

Geoff Hoon: I know that the hon. Gentleman thinks carefully about these issues, but I have emphasised that we must not determine them simply by reference to numbers. I know that he listened carefully to what I said. The issue for the Army today is not the number of infantry battalions that we can deploy but the number of supporting, enabling forces that can allow infantry battalions to deploy when we need them. That is the emphasis that I would like to hear from him.
	I have already praised the efforts of the Ministry of Defence's headquarters staff, both military personnel and civil servants.

Crispin Blunt: Will the Secretary of State give way?

Geoff Hoon: I have given way a great deal today, including to the hon. Gentleman. I need to reach a conclusion.
	Headquarters staff must not rest on their laurels. The cranes and scaffolding around the Ministry of Defence's main building in Whitehall remind us that the modernisation drive will go right to the heart of our defence machine. Through the adoption of new working practices and a modern open-plan working environment, we will slim the number of people in our London head office by more than 15 per cent. Whether in the headquarters, in the civilian staffs or in the services themselves, it is people who will ultimately make the difference. Across the Ministry of Defence, therefore, we need people who have the skills and ability to deal with the range and complexity of modern operations. That will mean different manning requirements and different skill sets to meet the changing environment. We will need to rebalance our force structures to ensure that the burden generated by the expected future operational tempo does not fall on certain individuals disproportionately, as it does too often today.

David Drew: One thing that my right hon. Friend has not mentioned is the engagement of British forces under blue helmets for the United Nations. A group of us went to the Democratic Republic of the Congo last week, and we were able to meet the small contingent—only six members of the British Army—who were there as part of the organisational development of the country. With such small numbers, and given that the Government of the Congo are now asking for more troops, even though the UN has undertaken a huge exercise there, what pressures does that put on our Army officers? Clearly, they are irreplaceable, yet for all sorts of reasons we must move those people around. Would he care to comment on that?

Geoff Hoon: I am grateful to my hon. Friend. He is right to draw attention to the considerable number of deployments in which British forces engage around the world at the request of the United Nations, NATO or, as we saw in the DRC, as part of an autonomous EU operation, which was very successful. Clearly, that creates pressures for our armed forces, but I know that he, like most Members, would want the United Kingdom to play its part in the world by supporting resolutions of the United Nations. Generally, the Ministry of Defence's most effective way of supporting them is to make forces available to ensure that those resolutions are carried through. That work will continue, but it imposes inevitable strains on Britain's armed forces that the Ministry of Defence and I must manage.
	Our response to the future strategic environment will be based around flexible and ever more effective armed forces that are structured and equipped to deploy globally and at short notice. The range of tasks that they will need to perform will be broad—from peacekeeping, humanitarian and confidence-building operations through to counter-terrorism and high-intensity combat against a diverse set of potential opponents. They will also need to be able to operate in rapidly assembled but effective coalitions. Flexibility is absolutely the key word—flexibility of people, policy, structures and equipment. That means taking some difficult decisions, but that cannot be avoided if we are to maintain the United Kingdom's reputation for having some of the most outstanding armed forces anywhere in the world.

Bernard Jenkin: This debate comes at a crucial time, shortly before the Government's long-promised defence White Paper. The Secretary of State's speech was a softening-up exercise—an exercise in reducing our expectations or increasing our dread at what is likely to come. I hope that things will not be quite as bad as he suggests.
	The Secretary of State's "get ready for cuts" speech even denied that we are short of infantry in the British Army. Can he justify the present level of infantry given that the average interval between tours is nine months when it is meant to be 24 months? I believe that the Royal Scots regiment has just been in Northern Ireland, and it has just had an infantry tour gap of six months.

Adam Ingram: indicated dissent.

Bernard Jenkin: If that is completely wrong, perhaps the Minister will tell us the length of the tour gap when he winds up the debate. When one meets the commanding officers of infantry regiments, they make it clear that they are not getting the tour intervals that were promised in the strategic defence review.
	This debate also takes place against the background of British servicemen and women serving around the world. Six months ago, British forces were committed to high-intensity combat operations in Iraq. In the past five years alone, they have been in combat in Kosovo, Sierra Leone and Afghanistan as well as Iraq. In Iraq, the security situation remains fragile. Our armed forces continue to do a brilliant job, coping with many extra tasks as a result of the Government's failure to plan effectively for the post-conflict phase. As well as providing security and military and police training, they are carrying out infrastructure and rebuilding tasks that maintain vital services to local people including water, electricity, basic health care and food. I join the Secretary of State in paying tribute to the armed forces and, in particular, to those who died in the conflict and since and to those who have sustained injury.
	Iraq remains an extremely high-threat environment because of organised crime and terrorist groups operating from within and outside Iraq and because of remnants of the Ba'athist regime. Despite that, progress is being made and we harbour no doubts that it is in the national interest and in the interest of global security as a whole that the allies continue to work to bring forward mature and representative administration in Iraq that is capable of preventing a return to dictatorship and the terrorism of Saddam Hussein.
	Questions remain, however. How long will British forces remain, and in what numbers? When will the Government succeed in persuading more nations such as Japan—which made an announcement yesterday—to join the peacekeeping and reconstruction effort that is so obviously in their interests as much as in ours? How much has it cost so far and how much more will we need to spend before the task is done?
	Politicians of all parties owe it to our armed forces not to let them down as they face these challenges. This debate is about ensuring that the Government have a sound and sustainable defence policy. Therefore, it is the right time—five years on from the strategic defence review—to look at the fundamental elements of the United Kingdom's defence policy. It is time to assess how the Government measure up to the challenge and, indeed, how they measure up to the challenge that they set themselves in the strategic defence review. Do they have a credible long-term defence policy? Finally, what are the implications of changes in Government policy with regard to European Union defence? In reality, do they want to have a sovereign British defence and security policy at all in the long term?
	There is little disagreement between us and the Government about the overall mission for defence policy. I can agree with much of what the Secretary of State has said today. The mission must be to protect the United Kingdom and overseas territories from military threats and terrorism, to safeguard the national interests of the UK wherever they are threatened and to contribute to global peace and security.
	We are confronted by three main threats: terrorism, both internal and external; the threat of ballistic missile proliferation; and the possibility, which we can never remove, of an attack by a foreign power on the UK, the UK's dependent territories or our allies. We also face the challenges of organised crime, and our armed forces have a role in dealing with civil crises. Rogue states, weapons proliferation and international terrorism are the new threats in the post-cold war world.
	On 31 May 2003, President Bush announced the establishment of the proliferation security initiative, which is also known as the Madrid initiative. It would result in the creation of international agreements allowing the United States and its allies, including the UK, to intercept ships and aircraft suspected of transporting illicit weapons, missile technology and suspect cargo. The most immediate target for the initiative is obviously North Korea, and we fully support the UK's participation in it.

Llew Smith: The UK is a signatory to the non-proliferation treaty, which places obligations on us to negotiate away in good faith our nuclear weapons. As we are failing to do that, does the hon. Gentleman not think that this country is also guilty of weapons and nuclear proliferation?

Bernard Jenkin: No, but I was intrigued by the hon. Gentleman's intervention on the Secretary of State. I will return to the issue of our nuclear deterrent.
	To deliver defence policy overall, we must maintain a military capability to act unilaterally, including with our independent nuclear deterrent. We must strengthen our ability to conduct military operations alongside the United States and our other allies, and we must develop NATO as the cornerstone of European, north Atlantic and global security. We must contribute to military operations in support of the United Nations as part of a coalition, including peacekeeping and humanitarian operations, and we must have the capability to provide the civil power with whatever military assistance may be necessary.
	The Government therefore need to deliver seven core military capabilities, and that is where we need to measure their performance. The first must be the maintenance of our independent nuclear deterrent. The answer to the hon. Member for Blaenau Gwent (Llew Smith) is that, if there were a prospect of every other country in the world getting rid of its nuclear deterrent, there would perhaps be a case for us getting rid of ours. I do not think that there is that prospect. Indeed, I read in the newspapers yesterday that Israel is developing a submarine-launched nuclear capability. A time of weapons proliferation is not the right environment for us to get rid of our deterrent.

Llew Smith: Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

Bernard Jenkin: I shall be very indulgent to the hon. Gentleman.

Llew Smith: If, in future, the hon. Gentleman should be responsible for defence matters, will he tell the House under what circumstances he would agree to the use of nuclear weapons? To what extent and in what instances would those weapons benefit our defences and the peace of the planet?

Bernard Jenkin: I am not going to make the mistake that, on occasion, the Secretary of State has made with regard to the question about the use of nuclear weapons. I will not give any indication at all of how a future Conservative Government might use an independent nuclear deterrent. Part of its deterrent effect is that we do not give out such information. I dare say, when I am trusted with it, I shall not discuss it with the hon. Gentleman or anyone else.

Llew Smith: rose—

Bernard Jenkin: I have given way enough. If the hon. Gentleman wants to continue the debate, I advise him to intervene on the Minister when he winds up. Our nuclear deterrent may seem outdated in the current threat environment, in which the deterrent effect of overwhelming firepower has failed to protect the west from rogue states and terrorism. But only the nuclear deterrent has eliminated for the time being the old cold-war-style threats. If we fail to maintain the deterrent, we will invite such threats to return. To leave the nuclear deterrent to other nations would certainly reduce our influence in the world and undermine our security. When so many other countries, such as North Korea, India, Iran, Pakistan and Israel are developing or enhancing their nuclear capabilities, it is hardly the moment for Labour to revert to unilateral nuclear disarmament, which I suspect is the hon. Gentleman's policy.
	If the Government are not to change their policy by default—this point is directed at the Secretary of State—they must begin to answer the question that the hon. Gentleman raised. During a visit to the BAE Systems submarine yard in Barrow-in-Furness last week—I did not have the entire week off—we were informed that the time is fast approaching when planning, design and assessment work on the successor to the Trident missile system must begin. That is because it must be ready in time to replace the current submarines, which will be retired in 2020. However, in a recent written answer, the Secretary of State said:
	"There are no current plans for a replacement for Trident, and no decisions on any possible successor system are yet needed."—[Official Report, 15 July 2003; Vol. 409, c. 199W.]
	I know that that answer is convenient for the management of the Labour party but the Secretary of State could be more forthcoming—perhaps the Minister of State will mention it in his winding-up speech—about when we need to start planning for a successor to Trident. I do not believe that no one in the Ministry of Defence is thinking about the subject. What are the thoughts of people in the Ministry of Defence? What kind of nuclear deterrent will we need in the future? Surely the Government will maintain a commitment to a continuous, at-sea deterrent because, as the strategic defence review pointed out, that is necessary
	"to avoid misunderstanding or escalation if a Trident submarine were to sail during a period of crisis".
	That is an important reason why we should not reduce the number of Trident submarines, even though we think that the need to use the nuclear deterrent might be much reduced in the current environment.

Llew Smith: Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

Bernard Jenkin: I have given way to the hon. Gentleman often enough.
	Will the Government be honest enough to have an open debate about Trident's successor in good time or—this might interest the hon. Gentleman—will we have a repeat of the debate about missile defence, when there was a covert U-turn with hardly any debate?
	The second key capability is global missile defence. How much better would it be if we could render a missile attack futile and ineffective rather than taking the hit and having to retaliate? We are pleased that the Government finally came round to our thinking on missile defence at the beginning of the year. Fortunately, the United States is making the main contribution, but the UK will make an essential contribution through the X-band radar station at Fylingdales. The UK should offer bases for ground-based interceptors, and we also anticipate that the Royal Navy's suitably modified Type 45 air defence destroyers will be used in a missile defence role.
	Thirdly, the UK must be committed to developing precision weaponry, including enhanced air and sea-launched cruise missile systems. Fourthly, we must improve surveillance, processing, communications and interoperability with our key allies. Fifthly, as my hon. Friend the Member for Newark (Patrick Mercer) has said, it is essential to have a home defence force comprising local battalions, which would probably be formed from the Territorial Army.
	Sixthly, we above all need flexible, rapidly deployable and sustainable regular forces. There must be the ability to deploy, in a worst case, a substantial expeditionary force to fight in a major regional conflict across the operational spectrum while continuing to sustain unavoidable existing commitments. Within that overall capability, sufficient flexibility to prosecute multiple operations at a lower level must be maintained.
	In 1998, the Government published the strategic defence review. They have achieved much that they said they would, but much of what has been delivered was already on track from the outgoing Conservative Administration. Our principal complaint is about the serious gap that has opened between the defence commitments that the Government have taken on and the resources that they have made available to match them. As Lord Guthrie of Craigiebank told the House of Lords on 17 December 2001:
	"The defence programme was underfunded before 11th September."—[Official Report, House of Lords, 17 December 2001; Vol. 630, c. 44.]
	Things have hardly improved since then. The policy for people was one of the key elements of the SDR but the Government have manifestly failed to achieve what they set out to do.

Geoff Hoon: Does the hon. Gentleman's endorsement of my noble friend indicate that the Conservative party's commitment is to spend more on defence than the present Government?

Bernard Jenkin: I shall make our commitment absolutely clear later in my speech. The election is still some way away, so we do not know what commitments we will have at that time or what the situation will be. I tell the right hon. Gentleman that we shall certainly consult defence chiefs and our allies when in government. We must also see the books, because the Government are a little tight fisted with information about the Ministry of Defence's long-term financial planning. For example, it would be interesting to see a 10 or 15-year projection of the real cost of the equipment programme, but I doubt that the Secretary of State will give me that information. If he would be happy to share it, we could start to explore exactly what we might spend. I do not think that any incoming Government have ever given such a specific commitment. The Secretary of State is to be congratulated on trying it on, with all his friendliness and good humour.
	On overstretch, the SDR stated:
	"We must break this vicious circle. To do so we must match the commitments we undertake to our planned resources . . . We need to improve recruitment and retention so that our units are properly manned".
	Armed forces personnel levels, apart from failing to meet manning targets in the SDR, have been cut back from SDR levels. I shall be accused of counting but every commanding officer of every battalion in the British Army, except those who have successfully recruited, has been counting how many soldiers he has under-recruited.
	"UK Defence Statistics 2003" reveals that there are now 12,000 fewer trained personnel than there were in 1997, despite the increase in defence commitments. Royal Navy warships routinely set to sea without their full complement. The SDR promised to increase the size of the Army by 3,300 yet, today, it is 5,000 men understrength compared with a target that has been reduced since the SDR.
	The overstretch of armed forces has become endemic. In June, 55 per cent. of the Army was either deployed on, or recovering from, operations, compared with an SDR assumption of about 25 per cent. In Northern Ireland, the garrison has been reduced not because of the improving security situation but because of operational commitments elsewhere. At a dinner with journalists on 28 April, the outgoing Chief of the Defence Staff, Admiral Sir Michael Boyce, said that any troops who had been withdrawn from the Province because of the peace process should be used to ease pressure on the forces and that the situation would not justify defence cuts. He said:
	"What we have got to avoid is this being seen as a great peace dividend by the Treasury . . . I suspect there would be a great temptation from our friends in the Treasury to capitalise on that."
	I hope that the Secretary of State will resist any such thoughts.

James Gray: My hon. Friend correctly said that the Secretary of State's speech sounded—through the general gabble—like a softening-up exercise for Treasury cuts to come in a future White Paper. Does my hon. Friend agree that the Secretary of State's body language while delivering his speech indicated that he was confident that he would not be the one to implement the cuts?

Bernard Jenkin: Let us concentrate on defence policy today, although I understand what my hon. Friend says.
	Admiral Boyce also said that military advice to the Prime Minister would be to avoid a "discretionary operation"—a war in which Britain was not under direct attack—for at least a year unless there was a "pretty compelling reason". He said:
	"If you asked us to go into a large-scale operation in 2004, we couldn't do it without serious pain. We must allow ourselves time to draw breath."
	That is a damning indictment of the Government's failure to deliver the basic promise on expeditionary capability that they set out in the SDR.
	I shall not dwell on equipment because that will be addressed in next week's proposed debate, but there is a real squeeze on the equipment programme that was laid out in the SDR. The carriers, which were the centrepiece of the review, are shrinking in size almost daily. Less than a year ago, the Secretary of State announced that the carriers would be 60,000-tonne ships. We understand that the two new large carriers are likely to be medium-sized. How long will it be before they become through-deck cruisers—the euphemism for small carriers that was acceptable to the Treasury in the 1970s under the then Labour Government?
	Given the age of existing fighter vehicles, the Government must get a move on. If the carriers are smaller, there will be fewer joint strike fighters. There are constant rumours about cuts to the Eurofighter Typhoon programme.
	The multi-role armoured vehicle has been cut. That followed the demise of TRACER, for understandable reasons. We are promised a new armoured vehicle that is to be in service by 2009, but the Government are only at the concept stage. That is a very short time frame to produce an entirely new armoured vehicle that is capable of carrying a 120 mm gun.
	The underlying picture is clear. The Government's defence ambitions are not matched by the resources that they are prepared to commit to defence. We are expecting a new White Paper on defence. The speculation is that it holds new cuts, and the Secretary of State did everything to feed that expectation in order to ameliorate the impact when it arrives. In June he spoke about moves towards a
	"balanced structure of light, medium and heavy forces, together with a greater emphasis on enabling capabilities"—
	thoughts that he echoed today. We welcome such continuing development, which builds on the work of previous Conservative Secretaries of State for Defence, but there is much more to be done before we have armed forces of the shape, size and capability that reflect the revolutionary change in the strategic environment after 11 September 2001.
	Though the armed forces have been substantially transformed since the end of the cold war, they still need to become lighter, more deployable and more flexible and interoperable with our key allies. What we are likely to see in the White Paper is a fanfare heralding apparently new, but mainly old and delayed, capabilities that have long been in the pipeline, many of which were ordered under the last Conservative Government. That emphasises the theme hidden in the Secretary of State's talk of effects-based warfare and flexibility, whereas the real agenda is cuts. All the indications are that the Secretary of State faces another bruising battle with the Chancellor, who himself faces a funding crisis in the public finances entirely of his own making.
	The Secretary of State warns of
	"a different requirement over time for main battle tanks",
	and of "some limited adjustments" for the Royal Navy. That is just code for more cuts. When he says that capabilities should no longer be judged by numbers of tanks or warships, but by their effectiveness, he simply confirms that he is in retreat.
	The Sea Harrier is already going, depriving the fleet of one of the world's most capable air defence fighters. I remind the Secretary of State that when the Spitfire was withdrawn from service, which he mentioned during his remarks, we had another aircraft, the Meteor, in service to replace it. There was not a six-year gap between the Spitfire and its replacement, as there is between the fleet defence aircraft, the Sea Harrier, being withdrawn from service and the introduction of the joint strike fighter.
	We also hear that the size of the Army may be scaled back yet again, with fewer infantry because the Government are unwilling or unable to meet the reduced manning requirements. Nobody but new Labour believes that less means more, yet that is what we are asked to believe.
	Despite talk about so-called improvements in the enabling capabilities, there are worrying signs that Defence Logistics Organisation staff may be cut back. In particular, the Government have been forced to reveal what they call "implications" for service personnel at the DLO, as the Minister of State told my hon. Friend the Member for Aldershot (Mr. Howarth) in a written answer on 18 September. The word "implications" must have a larger and more pregnant meaning. Of course, it is a cryptic clue meaning more cuts.
	Savings have already been made from reorganisation of the Defence Logistics, in the guise of efficiency. We are all in favour of efficiency, but it can be rather overused as an excuse. As the Select Committee has already pointed out, so-called efficiency savings are mainly generated from cuts in levels of stocks, which will have contributed to the problems encountered during the rapid deployment to, and sustainability in, Iraq. This problem, like the procurement problem and the manning and retention problem, goes to the heart of the Government's defence policy.
	There is insufficient resource to match the Government's defence commitments. Despite indications at the time of the SDR that 2.5 per cent. of gross domestic product should be reserved for defence in perpetuity, the figure has fallen consistently. We are now at around 2.3 per cent. of GDP, heading for 2.2 per cent. at the end of the plan period, compared with, for example, the US Government's 3.4 per cent. of GDP, rising to 3.8 per cent. over their equivalent plan period. The operating capability gap, of which the Secretary of State sometimes speaks eloquently, is getting wider and wider.
	In training, we have a dual problem. Not only is overstretch of regular forces disrupting individual and unit training, but problems have been caused by the lack of resources in the training system. In July, a report by the Ministry of Defence's directorate of operational capability found that armed forces training bases were operating
	"at the limit of, or beyond, capacity"
	because of staff shortages, which diluted the quality of training and the ability to offer pastoral care to recruits. It added that training
	"is running at risk and continues to be fragile".
	At the time of the report, Ministers promised that all the urgent vacancies for instructors identified by the Army would be filled by now. Have the Government achieved that? I hardly think so, but perhaps the Minister of State could let us know when he winds up. I hope also that Ministers recognise that staff shortages in training bases can also contribute to bullying problems, as we heard from the report by the Surrey police in relation to Deepcut.
	The current pressures on the armed forces mean that reserve forces are being intensively used, the Territorial Army in particular. In operations in Iraq, thousands of reservists were used to support the regulars. On 20 June, some time after the end of the conflict, almost 4,000 TA members were involved in Operation Telic. Two Members of the House and two members of the staff of the House have been called up to serve. The extent and duration of current commitments has been problematic for many in the TA, as they try to balance work and service commitments, but imagine how they feel to arrive in Iraq and be told that they are not to take part in security tasks, but are to be employed more like navvies in the reconstruction.
	In the debate on 12 June, my hon. Friend the Member for Mid-Norfolk (Mr. Simpson) warned that
	"many members of our territorial armed forces will think of leaving. Some have already told me that they intend to do so."—[Official Report, 12 June 2003; Vol. 406, c. 879.]
	On 30 September The Guardian reported that almost 2,000 TA members had left since March. We have learned that the total strength of the TA dropped from 39,210 in March to 37,360 in August, more than 4,000 below the Government's target. If Ministers can give us cheerier news, I will be the first to cheer.
	The House should be reminded that that target was already the result of an 18,000 cut in TA numbers in the SDR, a cut that the Secretary of State has admitted was a mistake, as we warned the Government at the time. The TA now also has an increased role at home, assisting with home security incidents as part of the civil contingency reaction force. How is it meant to fulfil this role, when it is so under- recruited at home, and when so many members allocated to those tasks are also committed abroad?
	I asked earlier whether the Government have a defence policy, and whether they are prepared to commit the necessary resources to sustain it. The final question is whether the Government intend to have a sovereign independent defence and security policy in future. The implication of their support for the European security and defence policy, leading ultimately to the EU constitution, is that they do not.
	As I mentioned earlier, the Queen's Speech last year reiterated NATO's
	"continuing role as the cornerstone of Britain's national security."
	We support that statement. The Foreign Secretary told the Select Committee on Foreign Affairs in November last year that
	"our alliance with NATO has to be the superior alliance in terms of defence".
	The Secretary of State's speech to the Royal United Services Institute in June stated:
	"It is highly unlikely that the United Kingdom would be engaged in large-scale combat operations without the United States, a judgment born of past experience, shared interest and our assessment of strategic trends."
	If only that strategic judgment and those other statements were genuinely reflected in the Government's policy.
	The Government have betrayed the assurances that the Prime Minister personally gave President Bush on these matters at their first meeting in February 2001. When President Bush emerged from the meeting to face the cameras, he was asked about the European security and defence policy. He said:
	"He"—
	that is, the Prime Minister—
	"also assured me that the European defense would no way undermine NATO. He also assured me that there would be a joint command, that planning would take place within NATO, and that should all NATO not wish to go on a mission, that would then serve as a catalyst for the defense forces"—
	that is, the EU defence forces—
	"moving on their own."
	Let us test those assurances against the reality of events since then. Before the Prague summit in February 2002, France threatened to veto the renewal of the NATO mandate in Macedonia unless NATO agreed to hand it over to the European Union—that was European defence undermining NATO. At the Copenhagen summit, the EU decided unilaterally to announce a takeover of the NATO peacekeeping mandate in Bosnia—that was in complete defiance of NATO's so-called "right of first refusal"; and the announcement was made without consulting the American delegation at NATO or anyone in the United States. Earlier this year, the EU announced that the French-led operation in Congo would be an ESDP operation outside the NATO planning and command framework—that was a complete denial of the joint command and joint planning with NATO that was promised to President Bush.
	All that was meant to have been resolved in the EU-NATO agreement known as Berlin plus, which was concluded just a few months ago after four hard years of negotiation. It gives the EU assured access to NATO military planning under the command of the NATO Deputy Supreme Allied Commander, who is always a European military officer.

John Smith: Does the hon. Gentleman recognise that the strength of NATO rests in the capability of our European allies? Does he think that the overriding objective is to achieve that capability, and that a European defence policy will do just that?

Bernard Jenkin: I agree with everything that the hon. Gentleman said until his very last point. The European Union is not increasing defence spending, but continuing to reduce it; and its duplication of NATO assets such as planning and the command structure means that it spends more money on headquarters and structures while taking money out of capabilities. How much more efficient it would be if it stuck to the Berlin plus agreement, which provided for European forces to be separable, but not separate, under the NATO umbrella. That agreement was concluded specifically to allay US fears that the EU had become a wasteful competitor to NATO, needlessly duplicating NATO assets, divisively decoupling US and European security policy, and discriminating unfairly against non-EU members of NATO.
	No sooner was the ink dry on the agreement than our own British Prime Minister was colluding with President Chirac and Chancellor Schröder to set up precisely the autonomous military planning capability that the US has set itself against. The German newspaper, Suddeutsche Zei tung,, reported after that meeting that it had obtained a joint paper setting out the agreement made in Berlin, which states:
	"Together, we are convinced that the EU should have a common capability for the planning and leadership of operations independent of NATO means and capabilities."
	Does the Secretary of State deny that that agreement exists?

Geoff Hoon: I have reminded the hon. Gentleman on several occasions not to rely on what he reads in British newspapers. I should also remind him not to rely on what he might read in German newspapers.

Bernard Jenkin: The Secretary of State does not deny that the agreement made between the British, German and French Governments exists. I shall give him another opportunity to do so.

Geoff Hoon: If the hon. Gentleman checks the terms of the Berlin plus agreement, which he enthusiastically endorses, he will find that it contains a specific reference to the EU conducting autonomous operations.

Bernard Jenkin: The Secretary of State has not answered the question. This is about conducting operations without the backing of NATO assets and capability.

Geoff Hoon: May I ask the hon. Gentleman to check what "autonomous" means?

Bernard Jenkin: May I ask the Secretary of State why the US ambassador to NATO, Nicholas Burns, said:
	"What we cannot support and will not support is the creation of an alternative EU military headquarters, whether it's in Tervuren or some other place, in Brussels or elsewhere"?
	Why do we read in today's Financial Times of US "dismay" over the Government's policy on EU defence? Is it true that Condoleezza Rice has telephoned No. 10 to discuss her concerns? The truth is that the Prime Minister has betrayed his promises to President Bush, not least by accepting the EU constitution. This is no "tidying up".
	Let us apply three tests to the EU constitution as it applies to security and defence. Is there any increase in qualified majority voting? Does it enable a hard core of member states to accelerate the process of creating an EU defence, effectively negating the UK veto? Does the European Court of Justice acquire ultimate jurisdiction over security and defence policy? The answers are yes, yes, and yes. Moreover, the constitution states, for the first time:
	"This will lead to a common defence."
	What could be clearer than that? We can be sure that the final draft of the EU constitution will reflect some little victory for the Foreign Secretary to wave at the press as evidence of "game set and match to the British" when he gets home, but the substance of the present draft will remain untouched.
	The Government can no longer accuse Conservative Members of inventing the image of a Euro-army: we can see, on our television screens and in our newspapers, British and other soldiers bearing EU insignia on their uniforms. We just need to listen to Lieutenant-General Rainer Schuwirth, chief of the EU's military staff, who says that a European army would now be possible as the EU's military staff has more than 190 officers and its own secure headquarters.
	In December 2000, the Prime Minister promised:
	"European defence cannot be a rival to NATO".
	He said there is
	"no proposal, no desire or decision for a separate European military planning capability".
	In the same month, he told the House of Commons:
	"The idea that this will be an independent standing force set aside from NATO is nonsense."—[Official Report, 11 December 2000; Vol. 359, c. 365.]
	The EU constitution is a direct challenge to the primacy of NATO and, ultimately, to the sovereign independence of our own national defence and foreign policy. The Prime Minister was being either incredibly naive or deliberately deceitful.
	NATO already provides for European defence. Every concession that Labour makes to the EU defence agenda strengthens those who want splits between the US and Europe. EU defence is about not more or better defence, but more structures, more headquarters, more offices and more committees. European nations should certainly share more of the burden of European defence and global security, but since the Prime Minister and President Chirac launched the concept of an EU military force in 1998, EU defence spending has continued to decline.

Malcolm Savidge: I am a little puzzled that although the hon. Gentleman suggests that co-operation over certain Petersberg-type operations would mean the complete loss of our sovereignty, he is perfectly prepared for us to make our defence policy completely subservient to the United States.

Bernard Jenkin: That is a completely inaccurate account of my argument. Of course I am in favour of co-operation, but the European constitution is not about that: it is about co-ordination, or structured co-operation, which ultimately involves some coercion in the event of unwillingness to agree. That results in erosion of the national veto and, ultimately, the subjection of our defence policy to the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice.

Malcolm Savidge: rose—

Bernard Jenkin: I shall not give way to the hon. Gentleman again—I want to complete my remarks.

Adam Ingram: Does the hon. Gentleman agree with the successful mission that we completed in Bunia in the Democratic Republic of the Congo—yes or no?

Bernard Jenkin: I am in favour of operations through co-operation between member states. However, the arrangements for which the constitution provides will develop and cease to involve simple, bilateral co-operation. They will lead to the creation of an institutional framework, ultimately overseen by the European Court of Justice, in which the increase in majority voting will progressively erode the veto over European Union policies. The debate is about that, but of course I am delighted with the achievements of British and other armed forces in Bunia. However, that is not a reason to submit European Union defence policy to the European Court of Justice and agree to increase qualified majority voting. Incidentally, the operation was carried out without the European constitution, so why do we need it?
	The EU defence policy is simply a platform for the vanity of old Europe. NATO, not the EU, won the cold war; NATO, not the EU, brought peace to the Balkans; NATO is peacekeeping in Kabul and supporting European troops in Iraq. Only NATO can bring the US and Europe closer together. As an increasing number of new NATO and EU members realise, NATO guarantees the independence and national sovereignty of its members whereas the EU constitution tends to undermine that. The constitution should therefore be subject to a referendum.
	As the Secretary of State said, yesterday was a historic moment for NATO because of the launch of the 20,000 NATO reaction force, which is capable of deployment at five days' notice. Unlike the ludicrous EU so-called rapid reaction force, it is genuinely operational now. As NATO Supreme Commander General Jones said yesterday:
	"For the first time in its history, the Alliance will have a joint (multi-national) combined air, land, sea and special operations force under a single commander, maintained as a standing rotational force."
	The Government should not agree to anything in Europe that undermines the primacy and pre-eminence of the Atlantic alliance in European security because our security and that of Europe depends on it.
	Britain's defence policy needs to reflect today's strategic environment and the lessons of recent military operations, especially in Iraq. The Government should have learned that they should be better prepared next time. General Sir John Reith confirmed to the Select Committee on Defence that British forces in Iraq were "perilously close" to not being ready.
	It was clear from the shortages of equipment, ammunition, spares and supplies for those on the front line that too much was left to chance. Moreover, the Government do not appear to understand that the success of peacekeeping and peacemaking operations depends not only on the latest technology but, crucially, on the number of boots that can be put on the ground.
	The Government's policy is too reliant on the sheer dedication and professionalism of our armed forces. Labour takes them for granted. Our pledge is to fund fully the defence capabilities necessary for our national security and for fulfilling our international obligations. At a time of increased threat and demands on our armed forces, the Conservatives will not let them down.
	The other big lesson is strategic: NATO is indispensable. The US is the only nation that has the military capabilities and will to guarantee European and global security. It is monumental folly for a British Government to help the French to undermine NATO and split the alliance.
	The difference between Labour and the Conservatives at the next election will be stark and simple. When the Conservatives say that we will back our armed forces and that NATO is and should remain the cornerstone of our security, we are not simply telling another Labour lie.

Llew Smith: There appears to be a reluctance to debate nuclear weapons, their use, the circumstances in which they would be used and their so-called benefits. I should therefore like to remind hon. Members of some past statements by prominent Members about the role of nuclear weapons.
	Some years ago, I initiated a debate on the future of the non-proliferation treaty. In 1995, when the Leader of the Opposition was a Back Bencher, he said:
	"The possession of such weapons is of no use unless we have the will to use them. If we possess nuclear weapons, we must make it clear that we are prepared to use them; otherwise we might as well not possess them."—[Official Report, 3 May 1995; Vol. 259, c. 247.]
	In another debate on defence in February 1996, I asked the Liberal defence spokesperson, Sir Russell Johnston:
	"If nuclear weapons were a part of our defence and if the hon. Gentleman were in a position of power, would he, if the crunch came, be willing to press the button to start off those nuclear weapons? If he did, could he anticipate some of the devastation that they would inflict on the environment and on the people of this planet?"
	He replied, after a fashion, that
	"the matter does get theological. I know perfectly well that there is a contradiction, but one prays that one will never have to use those weapons. I shall not go beyond that."—[Official Report, 1 February 1996; Vol. 270, c. 1164.]
	The leader of the Labour party, now Prime Minister, said early in 1997 at a press conference that he would be willing to press the button to launch a nuclear attack.

Crispin Blunt: While the hon. Gentleman is on the subject of the Prime Minister, will he tell us when the latter ceased to be his colleague in the parliamentary Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament?

Llew Smith: It is not my place to defend the Prime Minister's position. I am a member of CND now and I was a member some 40 years ago. I campaigned and demonstrated with my predecessor, Michael Foot, one of the great peace campaigners of the 20th century. Michael has not changed his position, I have not changed mine, but if the Prime Minister has changed his, he, not I, must justify that.

Adam Ingram: What about Nye Bevan?

Llew Smith: If the Minister bothers to read Nye Bevan's speech on resigning from the Government, he will realise that one of the reasons for his resignation was the exorbitant amount of money that we were spending on the arms race at that time. I therefore advise the Minister to read history. If he reads the history of that period, he will become far wiser about the subject that we are considering.
	Last year, I asked the Secretary of State for Defence whether he would be willing to press the nuclear button. He replied:
	"The United Kingdom would, in the right conditions, in extreme circumstances of self-defence, be prepared to use nuclear weapons."—[Official Report, 10 April 2002; Vol. 383, c. 30W.]
	I asked the Foreign Secretary whether he agreed that the most practical way of demonstrating to India and Pakistan that nuclear weapons undermined their security was for Britain to take a lead by ridding ourselves of our weapons of mass destruction. In his reply, he let slip:
	"I went on the Aldermaston march when I was 12, and I think that I am entitled to change my view between the ages of 12 and 55. Indeed, I was nearer to 12 than to 55 when I changed it."—[Official Report, 25 June 2002; Vol. 387, c. 731.]
	Many would argue that he was correct when he was 12. I suppose that the comments prove that people do not always grow wiser as they grow older.
	Sadly, it is clear that the leadership of all the major political parties in the House is prepared to commit mass murder with our weapons of mass destruction. That is chilling. Even if the hugely destructive weapons of mass murder were never used in anger, they have already caused the people of this country dearly in their taxes. They have cost others their environment. That applies to the lands of native American Indians in Nevada, where British nuclear warheads have been tested on sacred land, and the original uranium for nuclear warheads was obtained from Namibia, leaving a legacy of uranium miners with terrible respiratory diseases and cancers.
	There is also a financial cost. The Secretary of State for Defence admitted on 8 September that the total estimated cost of Trident was approximately £15 billion. How can we always find the money to go to war and to produce weapons of mass destruction when, at the same time, we find it difficult to fund the peace, and to provide the pensions that our senior citizens deserve, free university education, and the kind of public services that communities such as my own in south Wales depend on?
	The £15 billion being wasted on Trident is an obscenity. Not only could the financial resources have been better deployed, but the skills and talents of our designers, engineers, computer experts, construction workers and many more have been diverted from socially useful employment into developing nuclear weapons of mass destruction.
	In 1953, shortly after becoming President of the United States, Dwight D. Eisenhower—not a wild-eyed left wing revolutionary but a right-wing Republican—said something that we can all learn from:
	"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who are old and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its labourers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children . . . This is not a way of life at all in any sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron".
	Sadly, our diplomats, as well as our politicians, try to hoodwink the global public over our nuclear weapons of mass destruction. For example, Britain's representative at the 2002 non-proliferation treaty preparation meetings, ambassador Peter Jenkins, announced that the UK had
	"unilaterally reduced our operationally available stockpile to fewer than 200 warheads, which represents a reduction of more than 70 per cent. in the potential explosive power of our deterrent since the end of the Cold War."
	But as CND's excellent briefing points out, the 70 per cent. reduction in the explosive power of British nuclear weapons has been achieved largely by replacing older, higher yield warheads such as Polaris and WE177 with the lower yield but more flexible Trident warhead. We should remember what that much-despised but ultimately wise US President, Jimmy Carter, said in his final speech to the American people as President in January 1981. He said:
	"In an all-out nuclear war, more destructive power than in all of World War II would be unleashed every second during the long afternoon it would take for all the missiles and bombs to fall. A World War II every second—more people killed in the first few hours than all the wars of history put together. The survivors, if any, would live in despair amid the poisoned ruins of a civilization that had committed suicide."
	We should listen, and if we do, we shall learn.
	Even the current US Secretary of State, Colin Powell—while still Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff—at Harvard university in June, 10 years ago, could say:
	"Today I can declare my hope and declare it from the bottom of my heart that we will eventually see the time when that number of nuclear weapons is down to zero and the world is a much better place."
	Sadly the Bush Administration, of which Powell is now a part, are going in the opposite direction.
	We must continue the campaign against all nuclear weapons, in this country and in all other countries that possess them, or aspire to possess them, just as Michael Foot—my predecessor in Blaenau Gwent—is still, at 90 years of age, rightly raging against the madness of nuclear weapons. Yet while the Government argue in favour of British nuclear weapons of mass destruction, they were seemingly willing to go to war against Iraq, with all the suffering and death that that brought, because that country was supposedly trying to obtain such weapons.
	Meanwhile, Israel's ownership of nuclear weapons seems acceptable to our Government, as it obviously is to the Government of the United States. In the debate on Iraq in September last year, I reminded the House that the former Israeli nuclear scientist, Mordecai Vanunu, had been rotting in an Israeli prison for the past 17 years, when his only crime—if it can be so described—was to tell the truth and to inform the world about Israel's nuclear role, when all around him were lying. Sadly, my own Government have done almost nothing over those 17—now 18—years to obtain the release of Vanunu, who is a giant of the peace movement.
	Under our current policy of insane possession of nuclear weapons, we make ourselves and the rest of the world even more insecure, as other countries misguidedly seek, at huge financial and environmental cost, to copy our own nuclear weapons of mass destruction. In my opinion—and in the opinion of CND and the wider peace movement—that is unacceptable. I say on behalf of all people with a grain of common sense that the march towards nuclear destruction must stop.

Colin Breed: It seems curious to have a defence debate but no Defence White Paper. Like many hon. Members, I feel that today's debate is perhaps a softening-up exercise for the issues that we might discuss in a week's time. Nevertheless, recent events have clearly had an impact on British defence strategy. As the Government appear to have abandoned the strategic defence review, they certainly have some explaining to do. Today and next week will provide them with the opportunity to do that.
	I join other hon. Members in remembering the bravery of those who lost their lives and of those who are still in Iraq, whom we wish a safe and swift return home.
	The forthcoming Defence White Paper will have to strike some careful balances—the Secretary of State tried to tiptoe his way through that minefield earlier—so the sooner it is published the better. The longer the rumours about infantry cuts or procurement troubles are allowed to persist, the more morale will suffer.
	The Secretary of State was careful to stress that, as the Ministry of Defence learns the lessons from Iraq, it should be careful not to learn simply how to fight the last war. I hope that he sticks to his own advice. He also said, and the hon. Member for North Essex (Mr. Jenkin) repeated it, that it was highly unlikely that the United Kingdom would be engaged in large-scale combat operations without the United States. As a nation, we occupy a vital position as a key ally of the US, a central player in NATO, a member of the UN Security Council and an important member of the EU and the Commonwealth. Additionally, we still have commitments to our overseas territories. I do not need to remind the House that the US was not overly helpful during the Falklands crisis.

Bernard Jenkin: That really cannot stand on the record. Although the United States could not help us with overt military co-operation, it was of great assistance to us. That needs to be put on the record.

Colin Breed: I am happy to accept that, but at the beginning of the conflict, when perhaps we needed the best support, it was not forthcoming. Indeed, there is some evidence to suggest that the Americans were working for the opposition.
	The roles that I have just described for the United Kingdom are not conflicting roles. We must work within them all, in order that we might best maintain national and global security, and we must stand ready to act within each of them. However, this pivotal, multi-dimensional defence relationship carries with it complex responsibilities, particularly when partners within the alliances differ. There will be occasions when we shall be unable to satisfy all our allies, and we might have to choose. However, it would be dangerous and invidious if such decisions were based on the expediency of relationships rather than the principles that we as a country have long cherished.
	Flexibility was the watchword of the MOD during its process of reform, and that should include flexibility in terms of who we fight with, not simply how our forces are deployed. The moves on European defence that were made at the Rome summit are about exactly that flexibility. European defence policy is not, and should not be, about ceding control of UK forces; nor is it in direct competition with NATO or the US. European security and defence policy means that we can conduct operations in yet more frameworks with the US, NATO, the UN or the EU, as the situation demands. The counsel from the Conservative Benches to disengage from EU co-operation certainly runs contrary to the wishes of the US and would offer no advantage whatever to NATO. The Conservatives were certainly not opposed, as I understand it, to the Western European Union, which for many years provided a European pillar within NATO itself.
	EU operations such as those recently undertaken in the Congo, along with NATO operations such as those in Afghanistan, show that we can work in many organisations to try to improve security worldwide. NATO and the EU are not mutually exclusive. In fact, the EU will act only when NATO chooses not to do so. Therefore, NATO will continue to have, and must have, its prime role.
	Regrettably, our forces are deployed in more and more situations all over the world.

James Gray: Before the hon. Gentleman moves from the EU, will he say whether he foresees any circumstance in which our EU partners would increase their defence capability to bridge the gap that exists between the United States and us?

Colin Breed: I hope so. One of the responsibilities of the countries that are joining the EU is to begin to understand their responsibilities to overall defence policy. At present, it is difficult for them to perform those duties—they will be net receivers of EU support—but, as the Secretary of State pointed out, there will be certain groupings and an understanding. As part of the European Scrutiny Committee, I have visited a number of the acceding countries. They understand that there is a responsibility on them to ensure that they contribute, albeit proportionately, to the defence of Europe.
	Regrettably, our forces are deployed in more and more countries all over the world and, as has been clearly demonstrated, they are being stretched further and further, which gives everyone cause for concern, not least the troops themselves.
	The last adjustment to defence policy, the new chapter to the SDR, made much of network-centric capability and of interoperability with advancing US technology. I think that it is agreed, however, that that should not be achieved at the expense of ensuring that UK forces are properly provided for. Without enough talented men and women, there will be no one to implement UK defence policy. That is why our service personnel must always be the MOD's first priority. They risk their lives to fulfil their duty, and we must repay them properly for that service.
	Some strides have been made in that regard. I welcome the recent announcement that unmarried partners of members of the armed forces killed in action will receive equal pension rights as their married counterparts. The increase in widows' and widower awards is also timely.
	It is unfortunate that those achievements have been made at the expense of some officers' pensions. It may have been possible to improve the situation of everyone without penalising others if the MOD had not been wedded to the idea of cost-neutral reform. It would have been perfectly possible to keep the MOD budget cost-neutral while making adjustments within it.
	There is a danger of seeing such measures in purely fiscal terms—as an extra figure in the MOD budget—but the effect that such measures can have on members of the armed forces and their loved ones cannot be underestimated. To that end, I would like to raise a subject on which I have exchanged many letters and parliamentary questions with the Minster with responsibility for the armed forces: manning control points.
	In principle, a mechanism that prevents soldiers who are struggling from blocking promotion paths is reasonable, but in practice we have seen considerable evidence from former soldiers that the system has been misused, or at worst abused. Such a system should never be used simply to try to move decent, hard-working soldiers on to short-term contracts, under which they enjoy fewer rights and their service can be terminated without the pension entitlement that they richly deserve.
	When one is told by former servicemen that they believe that that is what has happened to them, one cannot take such an accusation lightly. If—this is another suggestion that has been made to me—undeserving soldiers have been bullied out of the Army and have chosen to release themselves from duty rather than face the embarrassment of being manning controlled, that is also a very serious matter.
	The Minister will no doubt be aware that soldiers who feel that they have been unfairly dismissed are assembling a court case. I hope that he can assure those soldiers that the Government will take their case seriously and look closely at their own practices. A repeat of the Gulf war syndrome case, in which the MOD refused to accept any responsibility, would not help the morale of those serving or those who are considering service. An early recognition of responsibility, if need be, is surely preferable to a hefty legal bill later.

John Smith: Surely the hon. Gentleman will recognise that the MOD's position on Gulf war syndrome is absolutely open and transparent. Unfortunately, the research that was commissioned by the MOD has not provided conclusive evidence, but open it has been.

Colin Breed: It is right to say that it has been open. I have been involved, as the hon. Gentleman has, in a number of debates in Westminster Hall and here and I think that we have rehearsed all the arguments on one side, but I still believe that there is a clear lack of genuine responsibility for the welfare of those soldiers. I am talking not about blame and the scientific evidence but about some recognition that those soldiers who are affected should have at least some support from the MOD, which they served.
	The importance of sufficient soldiers on the ground has been reinforced by recent experience in Iraq. Clearly, peacekeeping requires rather more soldiers for longer than combat operations. At a time when UK forces are deployed in so many places around the world, the Defence Analytical Services Agency figures for September show that the establishment strength of the armed forces, even including deployed reservists, is falling. I hope that the Minister may be able to confirm in his winding-up speech that infantry numbers will remain at least at current levels. To cut troop numbers when they are overstretched and when reservist numbers are falling could, at the very least, be foolhardy.
	I know that we shall discuss procurement next week, but it is right to put something on the record today as a precursor. The two aircraft carriers are essential to the SDR's expeditionary strategy. Industry sources have told me that the MOD's original plans were always over-optimistic and that the MOD quoted the best estimate for the lowest cost. Perhaps that is what we all try to do when we want to squeeze the proverbial quart into the pint pot but did the MOD play it straight? Was it looking at the broad estimates that were involved, or did it seek to find the figures that most closely fitted its case?
	Two smaller carriers may be better than no carriers at all, but we do not know that that is the case, or whether we have one instead of two. Clearly, there needs to be a cost-benefit analysis so that we know precisely that value for money is being achieved. What impact might the shrinking of the carriers have on the joint strike fighter? That is just one issue that will have to be taken into account—there are many others—when we decide to reduce the size or the number of such vessels.

Gerald Howarth: As the hon. Gentleman has said, we will debate procurement next week. I wonder whether he can tell us in advance, to inform our debate more fully next week, whether the Liberal party is in favour of the two aircraft carriers at the proposed size of 60,000 tonnes?

Colin Breed: We hope to be able to support that proposal, but, as the hon. Gentleman may well argue next week, we need a precise costing. Signing up to two large carriers now, on the basis of figures that may be wholly optimistic in terms of the final total cost, might not necessarily provide the value for money that he and other Members would want. Part of the problem is that because of our recent experience of cost and time overruns, decisions that were properly taken in a previous decade are regarded as rather less successful a decade later. We need robust figures to ensure that, if we do support the proposal for two carriers, they can be completed at the estimated cost and will produce the value for money that we are being encouraged to achieve.
	Rumours persist that the MOD will cut the number of Typhoons it plans to order. That may well be advisable, but, if we are to cut them, I hope that the Government will say so soon, perhaps today or next week.
	Procurement of major projects is not the only logistical problem that the Government face. One major lesson that the MOD faced in its "First Reflections" report was the supply chain management problems associated with getting equipment to theatre. It seems that even now some units in Iraq do not have desert kit. On 3 July, my hon. Friend the Member for Hereford (Mr. Keetch) asked the MOD whether all troops were now equipped with desert clothing. The Minister said that he would answer the question shortly, but it is still outstanding. I can conclude only that the lack of an answer means that the answer is no, but perhaps the Minister can offer another clarification when he sums up.
	We all acknowledge that we have the best armed forces in the world—a point that they have certainly proved this year—but as we ask them to perform more and more tasks we must surely ensure that we do not stretch them too far; we must ensure that their needs are put first at all times. They need to be certain about pensions, and about accommodation and kit. Praise alone, however welcome, is rather hollow if the important material essentials are missing. When they put their lives on the line for us, it is our duty to seek the best for them.

John Smith: I welcome the opportunity to make a small contribution to this important debate. It is more or less five years since the publication of the strategic defence review, and today gives us a chance to assess the effectiveness of what was a very important document and a very successful strategy. I say that because, at the end of the day, the best test of Government policy is in its delivery. In the five years since the production of that radical new approach to defence in this country, British forces have done an absolutely outstanding job overseas in completely different theatres. Confronted with completely different security environments, they have in every case successfully achieved their military objectives. We need not argue about this too much—our forces are doing a splendid job throughout the world. But let us make no mistake: there are problems and issues that need to be addressed.
	The SDR has been such a success that it is used as a model by other nations, in Europe and elsewhere, for reforming their military. I know that that is so because I have the privilege of being a member of the NATO Parliamentary Assembly and of the defence sub-committee, which examines the future military capability of NATO's existing and forthcoming members. We travel to those countries, and they tell us repeatedly that the policy document that they choose to use to confront the new world security environment is the British SDR. Combined with our military advisers in those countries, we are assisting almost all the aspirant members with their military action plans to qualify them militarily for NATO membership. What better tribute could any Government be paid than for their policy to be adopted by others?
	I had the privilege of attending the NATO Parliamentary Assembly in Edinburgh, at which the former Supreme Allied Commander Europe, General Wesley Clark, held up the British document and said, "This is the way forward not just for new NATO members, but for our European allies." That is why I must question the complete disapproval of the European security and defence policy on the part of the hon. Member for North Essex (Mr. Jenkin). The truth is that the ESDP will enhance, not undermine, the NATO alliance. He talked about duplicating military capability but that is nonsense, because such capability does not exist in most European allied countries, only one of which has any war-fighting capability. The Americans' biggest concern about the future success of NATO is its members' ability to pull their weight and deliver that military capability.

Bernard Jenkin: The hon. Gentleman is confused. I favour additional European capability, but the ESDP has produced not one extra bullet or lick of paint. In fact, it has probably used up defence resources that would otherwise have been spent on armed forces capability on extra headquarters and structures. The point is that the duplication of NATO planning and assets does not enhance capability; indeed, nothing could be clearer. Can he point to anything that the ESDP has created, in terms of capability?

John Smith: I can point to one thing: all NATO members, including Canada and the United States, and all NATO parliamentarians, unanimously supported the ESDP, because it gives us a better chance of forcing our European allies to deliver a capability that they do not currently possess. The tragedy is that Her Majesty's Opposition—the Conservative party, which once could have been called the party of defence—are so preoccupied with Europe that they are prepared to sacrifice that capability to get on the Euro-bashing bandwagon. That is dangerous militarily.

Bernard Jenkin: When the Prime Minister came back from launching the ESDP at St. Malo four years ago, the excuse given for it was that it was the only way to encourage European nations to contribute to additional defence capability. During those four years, defence spending in the European Union has continued to decline. Only France and Britain have marginally increased their defence spending, France rather more so than Britain; all the other EU countries have continued to reduce their defence spending, so the hon. Gentleman's policy is not working.

John Smith: The hon. Gentleman does not understand the arguments. There are two issues, one of which is defence expenditure. I agree entirely that it is a mistake for our European allies to cut their defence expenditure, given the increasingly dangerous environment that we find ourselves in. But the second and more important issue is how their existing expenditure is spent, and the point that the hon. Gentleman misses is that it is not spent on NATO-compatible capabilities. We want the money that they already have to be spent properly, although I agree that it should not be cut further.
	Although it offers no guarantees, the ESDP gives us an opportunity to persuade our European allies to develop a capability that they do not currently possess, and which will enhance NATO. The biggest threat to NATO is the gap that is appearing between north America and Europe in military technology and capability. The biggest supporters of the ESDP are the American military. They were the first to recognise it, and if the hon. Gentleman has not visited the Pentagon recently, I suggest that he do so to confirm that fact.
	I also pay tribute to this Government's successful defence policy in the light of the appalling mess that they inherited in 1997. We had witnessed the biggest real-terms cut in defence expenditure that this country had experienced in its entire history, including the 1930s. We saw nearly one third of the defence budget cut in real terms over a 10-year period.

Keith Simpson: The hon. Gentleman customarily speaks with great sincerity on this subject, but when I was a special adviser in the Ministry of Defence from 1988 to 1990, when we were moving on from the cold war into the new era, I do not recall him or any of his hon. Friends, then in opposition, asking us either to increase or even keep defence expenditure at its then current levels. If anything, they were asking for a greater peace dividend.

John Smith: I certainly would have called for increases, but the hon. Gentleman should be aware that I was not a Member of Parliament at that time. If I had been, I can assure him—I am almost certain—that I would have asked for an increase. In a sense, it was not the scale of the cuts that was so damaging, but the way in which the cuts were carried out. The reality is that, by the mid and later 1990s, we were left with dangerous capability gaps. There was virtually no heavy lift capacity whatever for the expeditionary force, virtually no medical support for the British services, because it had been decimated in that period, and virtually no second line of logistics for the entire British forces. The gaps in military capability were dangerous, and the strategic defence review has managed successfully, in a relatively short time, to fill many of those gaps—although I would be the first to say that there is still a long way to go.

Llew Smith: Would my hon. Friend have agreed to one cut—the £15 billion that has been, and is still being, wasted on Trident? If he is in favour of nuclear weapons, in what circumstances would he agree to their use? If they are used, what benefits would they bring to the people?

John Smith: I have to tell my hon. Friend that, as he knows, I have never been a member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. I have always supported a minimum deterrent, which is why I was surprised to hear the hon. Member for North Essex advocate, as the top priority for Conservative defence policy in the UK, renewal of the whole Trident and nuclear programme—at what price tag, I do not know. It should not be our top priority, because all the major nuclear powers are reducing their arsenals dramatically. George W. Bush has reduced the number of operational nuclear warheads in the US from 18,000 to 6,000. As an ex-serviceman and strong supporter of defence, I support that strategy of minimising—and, I hope, one day, eradicating—nuclear weapons of mass destruction throughout the world.
	Our security environment changes daily. It has changed dramatically since the strategic defence review, and the changes—not least the events of 11 September—have highlighted weaknesses in that review. I believe that 11 September represents the single largest and most menacing change in the security environment, and the most difficult one to address. We now need even more agility, mobility and flexibility, we need further reach throughout the world, and we need to confront many more scenarios than we could have imagined previously.
	Just yesterday, we saw the great achievement of the Chinese—I do not want to sound churlish about it—in putting a space man into orbit 14 times around the earth. What does that mean in security terms? It tells the rest of the world immediately that the Chinese have now developed, without any shadow of doubt, a global capability, when we have assumed for the past 50 years that they had only a regional capability. The purpose of a defence strategy is not to address the actual threats, but the potential threats throughout the world, and to develop our limited resources in the best way possible to meet those threats. The strategic defence review has achieved an enormous amount in that respect, but it has not achieved enough.
	I pay tribute to the Government for the biggest single increase in defence expenditure announced in the last 20 years, and I hope for further increases in the years to come. That is not because I am a warmonger, or because I want to encourage conflict anywhere in the world, but because I believe that an increased defence budget can be a force for good throughout the world. Investment in the right sort of military equipment will reduce the loss of life in the world.
	We saw that clearly in Iraq. The doom-and-gloom mongers talked about hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians dying as a result of the conflict, but that did not happen. One of the most important reasons why it did not happen in 2003 when it did happen in 1991 was the technical sophistication of the equipment used by the allies when they went into Iraq.

David Kidney: I share my hon. Friend's pleasure that not too many civilians died in Iraq, but I am finding it extremely difficult to ascertain exactly how many did die there. Does he have any accurate statistics?

John Smith: The sad fact is that we do not know, and we are unlikely to find, a definite figure, but it is certainly nothing like the predictions of hundreds of thousands of deaths that were bandied around at the time. I realise that it is a dangerous argument to talk about balancing 1,000 against 100,000 deaths, but I believe that a badly equipped and trained army is a dangerous army. Being properly equipped and trained makes our army one of the best. However, there is still a long way to go.
	Having paid tribute to the Government's defence policy, I want to deal with a couple of other issues. We have already touched on recruitment and retention levels in the services generally, and there is a problem there. We have to be careful because the nature of war is changing dramatically. The idea of having large numbers of infantry battalions is an old concept. What we need is the right number of people doing the right job in the right place with the right equipment. Frankly, that is not just a numbers game. Having worked in the services, I recognise that every commanding officer will argue that it is all about numbers and nothing else, but we have to deliver the right people.
	It is already difficult, but it gets even harder when we have a tight labour market. Recruiting in our inner cities is becoming more difficult, but the best place to recruit—historically and today—is precisely in our inner cities and in our less favoured areas. I happen to believe that joining the services—I would recommend it to anyone—provides an opportunity for youngsters who otherwise might not have one. It is a wonderful opportunity for a second chance for those who have not succeeded in school or elsewhere, and it gives them an ability to get on in life. However, ethnic minorities do not get the chance that they should get. Since 1997, we have had a good record on our targets for recruiting ethnic minorities. In a previous speech, I said that it was not good enough, and it still is not. The proportion of ethnic minorities in the armed forces should not reflect the proportion of ethnic minorities in this country: it should be double or even treble, as it is in the United States. That is because many people in that group suffer the worst deprivation and live in some of the most run-down inner-city areas in this country.
	In a previous speech, I asked whether it was conceivable that General Colin Powell, the first black man to become the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, could have ever become Chief of the Defence Staff in this country. Someone contacted me after that speech and reminded me that General Powell had commented on that very issue. When he went to Buckingham palace to receive his honorary knighthood, he pointed out that if his father had chosen to emigrate to Britain rather than to New York, his son would have been lucky to become a sergeant-major in the British Army. That is not meant as a condemnation of our forces, because they have done a marvellous job. The Welsh Guards attended the Butetown carnival this year, in the middle of the mardi gras, recruiting young black men and women from the docks in Tiger Bay in Cardiff. More can be done to build on the success of the last few years to improve the recruitment of ethnic minorities. That will help us to meet the capability gap in recruiting, personnel and training, so that our forces can continue to do the splendid job that they do.
	I recently had the privilege of visiting Ascension island, the airhead for the Falklands. As ever, we were welcomed by Squadron Leader Mark Pattinson and the other 25 military personnel on the base. We arrived late on a Friday afternoon and they all turned out to give us a warm reception and an excellent briefing before we flew back to this country. They are a splendid example of why our forces are so good.
	An important part of general defence policy has to be our defence industrial policy, although I do not wish to stray on to the subject matter of next week's defence procurement debate. The Government have made a good start by publishing the policy document, which has been well received by industry and most defence pundits. Of course, it is one thing to produce a good policy, but another to ensure that it works in practice. We need a balanced approach. We should not promote competition and the private sector for their own sake, because they will always be cheaper and more efficient. They need to be balanced against crucial military considerations such as efficiency, reliability, surge capacity and benchmarking.
	My only request to the Minister is that he consider carefully how that policy should be applied to the Defence Aviation Repair Agency, which was created four years ago to balance the need to provide the benefits of the imperatives of the commercial sector against the need to prevent monopoly, to provide benchmarking for prices in the industry and a surge capacity in moments of crisis and conflict, such as in Iraq recently. I am confident that if he applies his own policy to the agency that he created so few years ago, the future of DARA, especially in my constituency—and the construction of the £90 million hangar, which will benefit the whole Welsh economy—will remain on course and deliver the benefits that our military services deserve.
	Finally, I emphasise the point made by every hon. Member so far and pay tribute to the outstanding work that our servicemen and women do throughout the world.

James Gray: It is always a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Vale of Glamorgan (Mr. Smith), who speaks with such knowledge and passion about all defence subjects—although on this occasion I disagreed with two or three of his conclusions. I certainly endorse his tribute to our armed services throughout the nation and the fantastic job that they have done over the past five years. It is a tribute well worth paying, given that 46,000 of our troops and 25,000 vehicles were delivered to approximately the right place in Iraq with approximately the right equipment. That contrasted starkly with the performance of certain others in the same theatre of war, although I mean no discourtesy to them. I do not agree with the hon. Gentleman, however, that that was necessarily a result of the strategic defence review. Indeed, I think it may be the other way around—I think it may have happened despite the Government's failure to fund the SDR.
	Nor am I certain that the hon. Gentleman is right in saying that European security and defence policy will necessarily lead, somehow or other, to an increase in European defence spending. The evidence so far suggests that moves towards ESDP have led to a reduction in spending. I am sure that the Americans, Conservative Members and everyone else who may be listening would be only too delighted if the European nations said "Fine: we will have ESDP tomorrow, we will have a European army, and we will spend 3 or 4 per cent. of gross domestic product on defence". Europe would then be able to defend herself, which would be great—but no one in this or any other European country has ever come close to suggesting that it would be the case. The truth is that we depend on the United States and NATO for the safe defence of Europe and of this country. That will always be so, and I for one welcome the fact.
	I agreed with much of what the Secretary of State said. As he rightly observed, the nature of warfare moves forward all the time and all kinds of new challenges lie ahead. Asymmetrical warfare and dealing with terrorism, for instance, demand a different approach from what was required of us during the cold war.
	Incidentally, the hon. Member for Vale of Glamorgan—who I fear has now left the Chamber—was talking complete nonsense when he attacked us for reducing our defence spending towards the end of the 1980s. He had obviously forgotten the fall of the Berlin wall and the peace dividend, as it was always called, and he could not have read any of the reports—he was not a Member of Parliament at the time—of how bitterly the Labour party attacked the Government for not making far deeper cuts. Had Labour been in power at the time of the fall of the Berlin wall, we would have no kind of defence capability left, for Labour was still in thrall to the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. We would certainly have seen far deeper cuts had Labour been in power.
	It was refreshing to hear the hon. Member for Blaenau Gwent (Llew Smith) talk in a good, old-fashioned, pacifist, CND sort of way. He would have been entirely at home in the Chamber during 1986, 1987 and 1988, before the fall of the Berlin wall. He and the Labour party would then have been wholly in agreement, although now his is more or less a lone voice on the Labour Benches. I look forward to the speech of the hon. Member for Moray (Angus Robertson), whose views I suspect may be similar to those of his Celtic friend across the Chamber.
	As I have said, I broadly welcomed what the Secretary of State had to say about the change in warfare. I look forward to seeing the White Paper, which I hope will be published in the not-too-distant future—before Christmas, I trust. It will be interesting to see what it contains. The rumours that have circulated in the defence community so far have been worrying, to say the least. One also suspects, given the Secretary of State's body language, that—notwithstanding all the new Labour talk and all his clever expressions about making best use of our defence capabilities and resources—what he actually meant was that he was required to give the Chancellor of the Exchequer a jolly big whack of cash, and that it had been his job to try to find a way of cutting our defence capabilities in order to do that.
	In an intervention I challenged the Secretary of State to tell me if that was incorrect, and this was not about defence cuts. I challenged him to say that we would have the same or greater capabilities next year, the year after that and—if Labour was still in power, which I very much hope it will not be—in five years' time, which he signally failed to do. He would not give us any guarantee about future British defence capabilities. I fear that when the White Paper is published it will be full of clever-sounding new Labour expressions, rather like the SDR. As my hon. Friend the Member for North Essex (Mr. Jenkin) pointed out, in new Labour speak somehow or other less means more. The Government will spin in an attempt to demonstrate that although they are closing three infantry battalions and cutting one tank regiment, and are to reduce the size of the aircraft carriers, Britain should not worry about all those deep cuts. They will say "Don't worry about it, Britain. Your defence is safe in Labour's hands. We are saving loads and loads of money by cutting the number of soldiers, planes and ships. Do not worry about it—defence is actually better." I suspect that that is the sort of language that will appear in the White Paper. If I am wrong, I challenge the Minister of State to correct me when he winds up. I hope that he does not resort to clever new Labour spin to conceal the fact that the Government intend to make deep cuts in defence when the White Paper is published.
	My hon. Friend the Member for North Essex spoke very well about defence policy in general, so I shall deal with three specific matters. I suspect that the tension between capability and resources currently faced by the MOD will be highlighted in respect of each. The Minister will not be surprised to hear that the first matter is the announcement that the C130J fleet is to be moved from RAF Lyneham in my constituency to RAF Brize Norton. If all goes according to plan, RAF Lyneham will close by 2012.
	The Minister has often acknowledged that the plan is extremely bad news for my constituents. It will mean that 750 directly employed jobs will be lost, and that a significantly larger number—in local schools, shops and other enterprises that support the base—will also go. In addition, 2,500 RAF jobs will be lost—a matter that we have not faced up to yet. There will be a hole in the local north Wiltshire economy worth £75 million, which will be very significant for my constituency.
	The Minister is aware of all that. I suppose that he would be justified in arguing that the effect on the local economy is not his primary concern, which is to ensure that the defence of the realm is in place. To some extent, I would accept that. I welcome the fact that the Minister and the MOD have agreed to work with me and the local task force that I have set up to counterbalance the worst effects of the closure. I am grateful also for the fact that civil servants are now working with us, but I should like to make a couple of pleas in that regard.
	First, will the Minister ensure that if surveys of, for example, the contaminated land on the base are needed, the MOD will be prepared to go the extra mile to assist the task force in the work that it has to do? Secondly, will he ensure that the transfer, when it happens, will be swift and clean? We do not want RAF Lyneham to be left derelict or semi-derelict for a period of years, during which it could become a run-down mess.
	The base may become non-viable before 2012. If only a small number of C130K planes are left on the base, it is possible that it may cease to be viable by 2009 or 2010. We should much prefer the matter to be clean cut, with the RAF leaving cleanly so that new civilian businesses and houses can come on to the base. An extended run-down happened elsewhere in my area, at the Corsham base, which was left derelict for a long time after the military moved out. I hope that the Minister will keep an eye on that in the years to come.
	As an aside, I hope that the Minister will no longer be in post when RAF Lyneham closes. That is a purely political sentiment—on a personal level, I hope that the right hon. Gentleman will continue his work, but, on a political level, I hope to be doing his job by then. If that is the case, I shall certainly heed the request that I am making this afternoon. If I am not in his job when RAF Lyneham closes, I hope that he and his successors will do all that they can to facilitate the base's transfer to civilian use.
	My second point is that the Government seem to be concentrating all the RAF's air transport and refuelling capability—as well as most of its passenger capability—at RAF Brize Norton. They are putting all their transport eggs in one basket, in a very big way. If I were a terrorist, or belonged to a nation that hated Britain, RAF Brize Norton would be the first place that I would bomb and try to close down. That would ruin Britain's entire defence capability at a stroke. RAF Lyneham was red hot during Operation Telic. Planes were coming in and out all the time. The fact that the base had two runways was useful on at least one occasion—when one is blocked by a broken down aeroplane the other can be used. We were using RAF Brize Norton at the same time. If all those capabilities were based in one place—at Brize Norton in Oxfordshire—there would be a real risk of it being hit in some way, severely depleting our capability as a result. Leaving aside my constituency interest, the Minister should give further thought to the strategic downside of basing all our transport capabilities at Brize Norton.
	My second concern is entirely unrelated but it is a matter that is close to my heart. I was in the Territorial Army for seven years. I remain a member of the Court of Assistants of the Honourable Artillery Company—25 of its soldiers were deployed in Operation Telic. Thanks to my membership of the armed forces parliamentary scheme and my current membership of the Royal College of Defence Studies, I was pleased to spend a week in Iraq in May. During that time I met a great many Territorial Army soldiers. I wish to raise a number of matters relating to the TA and reserve forces, in particular with regard to their usefulness in Operation Telic and other future mobilisations.
	The whole Iraq operation could not have happened without the Territorial Army. That should be made plain and it is contrary to what was said in the strategic defence review. I think that a total of 8,800 reservists of one sort or another are serving in the Gulf. At one stage, about 25 per cent. of ground troops were from the TA. They brought a large number of specific skills to the war effort—skills that could not have come from the Regular Army. I am thinking in particular of the Port and Maritime Regiment, which was deployed first in Southampton Marchwood. The regiment was responsible for all the 25,000 vehicles that were loaded. Then, it was moved to Um Qasr in Iraq and was responsible for those vehicles being unloaded, deployed in the field and brought out again. That port and maritime operation was carried out by a TA regiment that was called up on Christmas day, if I remember rightly, and was being used until the other day when the troops were finally demobilised.
	The same applies to a significant degree to the Royal Army Medical Corps. A significant number of the medics were national health service doctors and nurses. The operation could not have been carried out without them. The Royal Logistics Corps and the Signals also relied significantly on the TA. There were lots of other teeth arm people out there—infantry people and special forces—and all of them were from the TA. I am sure that the Minister will be the first to acknowledge the superb effort that members of the TA made.
	I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for New Forest, West (Mr. Swayne), who is serving as a major in the Territorial Army in Iraq and my neighbour and hon. Friend the Member for Westbury (Dr. Murrison), who is serving with the medical services there. It is remarkable that two Members of this House and two members of staff, I think, are serving in the Gulf.
	Looking forward, it is one thing to have the compulsory mobilisation of that number of TA soldiers to fight a war—that is broadly acceptable to families and employers—but what is slightly more worrying is the compulsory mobilisation under the Reserve Forces Act 1996 that is now taking place and is apparently likely to continue for many years to come. People are being sent compulsorily from this country—whether they want to go or not—to serve in Iraq in peace-building operations of one sort or another. I shall be interested to know the Minister's reaction to that. Sooner or later, I think that that will become less acceptable than compulsory mobilisation for fighting a war.
	The Regular Army expects to go to places such as Iraq to undertake peacekeeping operations, build infrastructure and so forth. A stockbroker does not expect to be called up compulsorily to go to Iraq six or 12 months after the war to patrol and be on guard, or even to relieve Regular Army counterparts. I suspect that there will be a difficulty with retention and recruitment in the TA if such mobilisations go on indefinitely. It would be interesting to hear the Minister's view on what can be done to avoid that.
	I have several questions about pay and conditions. I think I am right in saying that, under the Reserve Forces Act 1996, once someone has been compulsorily mobilised for a six-month period, they cannot be remobilised for another three years. If that is so, now that so much of the Territorial Army has been mobilised what on earth will we do if another Iraq arises next year or the year after and it is still three years before we can replenish our reserves?
	What can we do about the attitude of employers? Later this year, it will be compulsory for employers to know when their employees are members of the TA, which I broadly welcome. One could argue—I often do—that people should not join the TA unless they are prepared to serve. That is only fair and it is right that employers should know. However, I fear that some employers will say, "Well, if you're in the Territorial Army, I'm not going to employ you." Some private sector employers might have some reason for doing that, but even more worrying is the fact that several public sector employers have adopted that position. I am told that both the Leicestershire and the Cambridgeshire fire authorities have said that no firemen may be in the TA. That seems bizarre. Similarly, two or three police forces have said that no policeman may be in the TA. The Government should make it plain to public sector bodies that if they are in receipt of public money, they should employ members of the TA and other reserve services. Perhaps the Minister could do something about that.
	I have come across several soldiers who suffered problems after compulsory mobilisation due to the pay structure. Members of the TA receive the same pay as the equivalent rank in the Regular Army. Incidentally, I apologise to the Air Force and the Royal Navy, I am including all three services; I use "TA" as shorthand because I served in it. However, if soldiers can demonstrate hardship—for example, that the amount of money that they are receiving from the Army, Navy or Air Force is less than they need to pay their mortgage and normal outgoings—they are given a hardship payment to make up the difference.
	The difficulty lies in the necessity to demonstrate to the authorities that one is suffering hardship. Almost all the TA soldiers who were called up had to do that. They had to produce bankers' orders to prove that they were paying their mortgage so that their pay could be made up to a level that would prevent their families from suffering hardship. There were benefits for those who could see what was coming and had converted their credit card payments, for which they were not paid by the Army, into bankers' orders, but not for those who were unprepared. That is wrong.
	If members of the Territorial Army and other services are to be compulsorily mobilised their pay should be commensurate with their civilian pay. They are being taken away from civilian life, where they have family commitments and houses, and receive quite different rates of pay that do not allow them to keep up their way of life. Reserve forces' pay should be linked to civilian pay, although there should be some form of capping. It would be unacceptable for a stockbroker giving up a £150,000 job to be a private soldier to receive the same rate of pay. However, there should be some broad link, without the intrusive pay inquiries that went on during the run-up to Operation Telic, and without too much examination of people's bank statements, so that their way of life can continue as it did before their call-up.
	The House will be aware of reports such as the one in The Daily Telegraph on 29 May, headlined:
	"TA faces mass fall-out in Gulf pay bungle".
	There was an entire page of articles about people affected by a pay bungle in the pay department of the armed services. As we heard earlier, The Guardian reported that 2,000 people have left the reserve forces since Iraq.
	The figure may be incorrect and I should be happy to have the Minister's assurance that he is confident that both retention and recruitment in the reserve forces will continue at their current levels. However, the RAMC in my area—Wessex—reports significant departures. NHS personnel in the RAMC are saying, "I'm not having this. I'm not going to be called up compulsorily and kept out there for unreasonably long periods and paid less than I would be as a consultant at my local hospital. I am not going to do it. My wife won't let me do it. I am very sorry but I am going to leave the Territorial Army." If the Minister disagrees, he must say so and let us know what he intends to do about it to ensure that retention and recruitment in the TA and the other services is kept up. I suspect that part of that may involve linking their pay to civilian pay. Incidentally, there is one other thing that he could do about that—we ought to have a mobilisation day.

Adam Ingram: It is important to correct the hon. Gentleman's comment about 2,000 part-time soldiers—as they are called in an article that appeared in The Herald and elsewhere—leaving the Territorial Army. I asked for that to be looked at, and it is important to correct what has been said because other hon. Members have referred to it. General Sir Mike Jackson, the Chief of the General Staff, has replied to The Herald—I hope that other papers pick this up too—saying:
	"There is no evidence in any of the volunteer reserve forces of mass departures from the TA as a result of the call-out and service in Iraq. The drop in TA numbers is seasonal and consistent with previous years. It is largely due to the departure of officer cadets in the University Officer Training Corps",—
	which is part of the TA—
	"in their third year, who, on reaching the end of their studies, leave the UOTC. The new university intakes join in October."
	So there has been a departure, but for those reasons.

James Gray: I very much welcome that reassurance. It is important that we know that, and it will be important to revisit that statement in the months to come. I hope that that will remain the case and that we will not find that TA people are dropping out. I think that I am right in saying there are 38,000 people in the TA, but there should be 45,000 under the SDR.
	I understand that we are currently going through the bidding process—to use laymen's terms—where various parts of the Army bid for TA back-up. Those bids will be decided by the end of this year, and I understand that they currently amount to about 95,000 or 100,000 TA soldiers. We currently have 38,000—less than half what the Army is asking for—so the presumption is that there will be some very heavy scaling back on what the Army is requesting and, no doubt, a careful re-examination of the way in which the TA works and what it does. It would be interesting to know the Minister's reaction to that suggestion and his thoughts about how on earth the TA can begin to supply anything like what the Army is asking for; or perhaps he is considering fundamental restructuring in the roles that it plays.
	I wish briefly to mention something else on that front. My hon. Friend the Member for North Essex and the Secretary of State referred briefly to a home defence force role for the TA. Of course, it has always had such a role—that is why it is called the Territorial Army—and there has always been an argument for some kind of home defence role. However, I simply wish to say two things. First, giving the TA one week's extra training, which was announced under the new chapter of the SDR, is laughable. That amount of training is absolutely neither here nor there. It is entirely pointless, and the TA might as well not do it.
	Secondly, if, as some have suggested, the TA is taken away from a war-fighting role and moved into some kind of home defence role—a key points guarding role of some sort—on an ongoing basis, I guarantee that people will leave the TA. There is no way in the world that the people with whom I served in the TA, who are trained for war-fighting roles, would content themselves with some sort of "Dad's Army" role, guarding key points.
	Of course, like the Regular Army, the TA is ready to fulfil such roles, but only if they are taught war fighting. They must be taught war fighting and they may then use those skills in aid of the civilian power. That is a perfectly normal role of both the Regular Army and the TA. However, if those in the TA only had a home defence force role, they would not stay there. As evidence for that, we need only glance back 10 years, or thereabouts, when we had a huge home defence force, which the then Conservative Government set up. We took a lot of former TA and regular soldiers into the home defence force, but it did not last more than two or three years. It was impossible to recruit or retain soldiers. People will not give up their weekends, two weeks a year or Wednesday nights for training to do a job that they believe the police could easily do. They must be trained for war fighting, albeit using those war-fighting skills for defence of the civil power.
	One last matter on which I want to touch only in passing relates directly to defence policy, but is none the less extremely important. One of the things that one is required to do at the Royal College of Defence Studies is write a 10,000-word thesis, which I am glad to say I did. I did it on the subject of the use of the royal prerogative to go to war, and I did it largely by examining Hansard dating back to the second world war and examining the way in which we decided to go to war in every war since then, up to and including Afghanistan. The reality, of course, is that in all those wars, two or three of them under this Government, no vote was allowed in this place at any time, nor was there any suggestion that there should be one. In most of those wars, the Secretary of State or the Prime Minister came along to the House of Commons two or three days after the war had started to announce what they had done and to say that the people would judge them in a subsequent general election if they did not get it right.
	I know that that runs contrary to what a great many of my hon. Friends and many other Members would think, and that they would ask what is the purpose of having a great House of Commons if we cannot even decide whether to go to war. I would say that the decision to go to war is a great deal too important to leave to this Parliament. It should not be a matter for this Parliament—it should be a matter delegated to the chief executive, the Prime Minister. He should decide on the basis of the secret intelligence available to him what troops he should deploy and what the troops should do when they are in the theatre of war. After all, had the Prime Minister taken that approach, had he not sought to spin and to persuade this House of Commons and the nation that what he was planning to do in Iraq was right, and had he done what he did in relation to Afghanistan—placing a paper in the Library and saying that he had a great deal of secret intelligence that he could not share, but that he must tell the House that he believed that sending in troops was the right thing to do—he would not be in the position he is in today. It is only because he felt the necessity to spin and to persuade people that somehow he landed up in the appalling shambles that we see unfolding in the Hutton inquiry.
	Were we in future to have an evenly balanced House of Commons, with perhaps a majority of one or two on either side, and were we required to come to this House for a vote on a war, it seems to me that the Opposition, however noble and distinguished they may be, would take party political advantage of that narrowness of the majority, giving away statesmanship in favour of political expediency. I know that this is a deeply unpopular view in my party, and almost certainly a deeply unpopular view within the House as a whole, but I believe fundamentally and passionately that we should ask the Government to carry out certain functions for which they should be answerable in retrospect but for which they should not have to justify themselves to the House in advance. There is a place in modern government for the royal prerogative, and the Prime Minister was incorrect in allowing political pressure to force him to come to this House and seek two substantive votes prior to the Iraq conflict. He should have just gone ahead and done it, and if he had got it wrong, we would have told him about it in no uncertain terms in retrospect.

Angus Robertson: Does the hon. Gentleman believe that there are any other policy areas in which Parliament should not take part, or is it only matters of life and death on which Members of Parliament should not decide?

James Gray: There are quite large numbers of Government policies on which the House takes no decision, such as the appointment of ambassadors and bishops. There are all sorts of areas in which the Prime Minister makes use of the royal prerogative that he has inherited to make dozens of decisions that do not come to this place. If we had a vote in the House every time a bishop was appointed, we would be bogged down to say the least. There are large numbers of areas in which we leave it to the Prime Minister to make up his mind. After all, that is part of parliamentary democracy. When a general election comes, we look at what the Prime Minister and the governing party have done and we decide whether it was a good thing. If every decision, no matter how important or unimportant, came to this place for a vote, they would not be accountable for their actions in the same way as they are under the current system of parliamentary democracy. I realise that that is not a popular view, but having just completed that thesis, on which I shall shortly publish an article, I thought that I would take the opportunity of sharing it with some of my parliamentary colleagues.
	Leaving that point to one side, I have a real worry about the way in which the Government seem to be committing us to more and more overseas adventures of one sort or another. We seem to be involved in them with fewer and fewer resources. Rather than face up to that, the Government seek to camouflage the imbalance between commitments and resources with new Labour spin and new talk, with all these clever expressions about modernising warfare and all the standard guff that we hear all the time from the Labour party.
	I challenge the Minister to be absolutely straightforward in his response. If he has not got the right resources and if the White Paper is about cuts so that the money can be spent on health, education or other things, I challenge him, for heaven's sake, to say that we do not have the resources to do the things that we would like to do. That is what the people of this country would expect him to say.

David Kidney: It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for North Wiltshire (Mr. Gray). I enjoyed his speech until he came to his final remarks. I thought that it was a very welcome development that Parliament had the final say on the biggest decision that we can take, which is to start a war. However, there will be emergencies when actions sometimes must be taken before Parliament has all the facts, can debate the issue and make a decision. I also welcome what he said about the Territorial Army and reservists, especially the point about the importance of responsible employers ensuring that the reservists have time off to do the important work that they hold themselves ready to do for this country.
	I congratulate the hon. Member for South-East Cornwall (Mr. Breed) on his new responsibilities and I wish him well with his brief for the Liberal Democrats.
	My constituency has hosted RAF Stafford for more than 60 years, and today its role is to provide combat support services and single service storage and distribution. I therefore thought that I would confine my comments to the policy for defence logistics. A good place to begin is Operation Saif Sareea 2, which took place in September 2000 when United Kingdom and Omani forces came together on an exercise. The UK tested our ability to conduct expeditionary warfare and provide support for expeditionary forces. The National Audit Office gave a reasonably positive assessment of that exercise in July 2002. It concluded that
	"logistic support was demonstrated with personnel and equipment being successfully moved to, from, and around a large theatre of operations."
	Beyond the headlines, there are issues of concern, and I shall pick out two that are relevant to this debate. The first is the issue of strategic lift. Although dedicated strategic lift assets are probably a matter for next week's debate, the policy relies on access to civilian planes in so far as the Ministry insists on using them for part of its strategic lift capacity. As the National Audit Office said, if we rely on civilian planes, it is absolutely essential that we have guaranteed access to sufficient civilian strategic lift resources in a crisis. I endorse that conclusion.
	In relation to the Saif Sareea exercises, the National Audit Office drew attention to the unreliability of asset-tracking systems and pointed out that there were periods when it was not possible to track items sent from the United Kingdom to the exercise theatre. The Public Accounts Committee reiterated those observations and also commented on communications, which again are more a matter for next week's debate.
	The conflict in Iraq began with a build-up of our forces mostly in Kuwait and it was then followed by military action. From a logistics point of view, I want to deal with the reports of shortages of supplies that the hon. Member for North Essex (Mr. Jenkin) picked up. I have followed the story and it is my experience that many of the reports were exaggerated. In fact, some of them were unfair to the people who delivered supplies to the front. However, there are points to address.
	Lord Bach, who is Minister for Defence Procurement in the other place, talked about that subject when he addressed the Royal United Services Institute for Defence Studies at the end of July. He said:
	"In a logistics exercise of this size, there were bound to be some problems. Most of these were addressed quickly. Others proved more difficult to solve."
	In his speech, he continued to talk about some of the difficulties and how they could be resolved. He mostly drew on a report that was published in July entitled "Operations in Iraq: First Reflections", so I shall move on to that report directly rather than quoting him second hand.
	The report said:
	"Initial reports suggest that our equipment and logistics support performed well overall, although improvements are required in respect of asset tracking and distribution within theatre."
	It includes a comment that the Ministry of Defence is able to track assets that have been properly put together and sent to theatre but that we cannot check where they are when things are off and running.
	The report made general conclusions that I shall draw to the attention of the House. We are endeavouring
	"to integrate more closely the idea of single-Service supply chains",
	yet the report confirms that we are still some way from completing that work. It drew the important conclusion that we must be careful about the balance of ready stocks that we hold and those that we source directly from industry, which especially relates to points made about boots and clothes. The message is not to be too seduced by the "just in time" philosophy of commerce in some of the situations that we face during warfare.
	The report drew attention to the need for a
	"common and robust tracking system to enable equipment and stocks to be tracked throughout the supply chain in fast-moving, complex operations."
	The last conclusion to which I shall draw attention, which is relevant to human support for people doing the fighting, is the
	"need to review the provision of Temporary Deployable Accommodation to ensure that accommodation and human support services are made available to our people, particularly in arduous locations."
	Behind those recommendations, we must recognise the immense human effort involved in delivering logistic support to the front line. Given that RAF Stafford is a storage and distribution point, as is the Ministry of Defence's Army base at Donnington, I was able to see the work of the people at the Defence Storage and Distribution Agency, who are mainly civil servants, during Operation Telic. I saw their commitment and dedication and listened to their stories of 12-hour shifts, seven days a week. I saw them send away the items that formed part of the supply chain. Their dedication and commitment made the logistic side of Operation Telic a success. The telling statistic when one compares Operation Telic with Operation Desert Storm in 1991 is that we transported twice as much in half the time. The personnel who were involved in that tremendous achievement deserve a big "well done" from the House. The operation required the movement of 46,000 service personnel, ships, aircraft, armoured vehicles, support equipment, clothing, accommodation, medical equipment and food supplies over 5,500 km to the theatre of war.
	News of progress on the Ministry of Defence's end to end review, which is one of many reviews that I want to mention in a moment, followed for the Defence Storage and Distribution Agency, although I hesitate to say that the review has ended—it will continue. As a first consideration of the review, my right hon. Friend the Minister of State said:
	"The Ministry of Defence has recently completed a detailed review of the way in which we provide logistic support to land and air forces (including naval air and the royal marines)."
	He said that the review was a fundamental and wide-ranging piece of work, examining the totality of our logistic support from industry to the front line, that the work was in progress, and that consultation with trade unions would take place at every step along the way. He said that a number of key changes were needed, which had been identified. He told the House in September that he had placed a summary of the conclusions of the initial report in the Library, where hon. Members have access to it.
	I notice that the end to end review is one of many reviews of the supply chain currently taking place. I was told in the summer that 21 reviews were under way at the same time. There are two dangers associated with such activity. First, there is the effect on human beings. We all wonder about the need for change and worry about the uncertainty created by talk about the need for change. There is a danger that the morale and confidence of those doing the work might be affected by too many reviews at the same time.
	Secondly, each review can be justified on its own merits. The people carrying out each review can justify the conclusions that they reach, but it is important to retain an overview of the total effect of all the reviews being completed together, to ensure that the strategic service is satisfactory and robust at the end of the process. However, I should not like my right hon. Friend to think that I have anything against the Ministry of Defence keeping a finger on the pulse of what is happening.
	I recognise how quickly the strategy of warfare changes, not to mention the technological developments that take place. Together, those factors for ever change the requirements of our armed forces and our ability to conduct war, whether in our defence or in other people's countries. I recognise, therefore, the need for such reviews. I simply warn about the effects of too many reviews at the same time.
	I shall say a little about RAF Stafford's present position. At least three of the current reviews have a bearing on its future. We have the airfield support services, the future defence supply chain initiative, and the air combat service support units. The most high profile part of the airfield support services review has already been mentioned in the debate—the future of the fire defence service, which has a presence at RAF Stafford.
	The review of the future defence supply chain initiative has a bearing on all the civil servants who work in the storage and distribution service at RAF Stafford. The review of the air combat service support unit has a bearing on the uniformed personnel at RAF Stafford. To give the full picture, there are about 700 uniformed personnel and about 1,100 civil servants at RAF Stafford.
	The trade unions nationally are concerned about the reviews relating to the present work carried out by the civil servants. They fear excessive privatisation and a loss of civil service jobs, a loss of the civil service ethos on which the forces can rely, and a loss of the ability of the supply chain to respond in an emergency, as the civil service has always done. It is appropriate for me to say to my right hon. Friend the Minister that the trade union campaign concerns me. I take an interest in what the trade unions say to me. My right hon. Friend needs to be able to meet their concerns in the outcome of the reviews that he announces to the House in due course.
	Those who work at RAF Stafford, whether in uniform or as civil servants, do tremendous work for the armed forces generally. Not only I, but the whole community of the Stafford area believe that. We have very good relations between the civilians who live in the area, including those whose jobs are at RAF Stafford, and the uniformed personnel based there. Between us, we create a good relationship between civilians and the armed forces: that is perhaps reflected in Staffordshire's good armed forces recruitment record.
	The combat support personnel at RAF Stafford are ready to be deployed anywhere in the world at any time. When they are required to go, they go: they are a very reliable part of the supply chain. The tactical supply wing should never be overlooked—its personnel provide the fuel for helicopters used in the activities of our armed forces, not only at the front line, but sometimes beyond it. I have seen images of the holes in the ground in which our personnel work in Afghanistan and Iraq as they keep our helicopters flying, whether on offensive operations, delivering supplies or taking the injured away from the front. They are an important part of the forces on every deployment. How many people know that for the past 30 years the tactical supply wing has worked continuously to supply fuel for helicopter operations in Northern Ireland?
	Having been a regular visitor to the Defence Storage and Distribution Agency at Stafford, I would rank its civil servants with the best in the commercial sector. For example, nationwide storage and distribution for Argos is based in Stafford, and there is absolutely no difference between the quality and effectiveness of the two operations.
	Despite all that, there is some concern about ongoing reviews that may affect RAF Stafford. In recent years—the hon. Member for North Wiltshire mentioned this—local councils have been consulted by the armed forces when decisions taken following such reviews may have an impact on the local community and economy. That is a good development. The new council that was elected in Stafford in May recently had such a consultation. Perhaps it took it the wrong way or did not understand the importance of an open exchange of views at an early stage, but it came away with the impression, which it then publicised to our community, that RAF Stafford is in danger of closing. The same review team conducted the review into the closure of RAF Lyneham that was mentioned by the hon. Gentleman. Will my right hon. Friend comment on that, especially in relation to the possible effect on the air combat service support units at RAF Stafford? I hope that he will say that the camp has a future.

James Gray: The hon. Gentleman is right to be concerned, but he should nevertheless be cautious about the assurances that he receives. When I raised the matter of RAF Lyneham with the Prime Minister at Prime Minister's Question Time, he told me that he was certain that it would play a central role in future conflicts. How wrong he was.

David Kidney: I remember the hon. Gentleman making those comments, so I shall bear that in mind. However, I know my right hon. Friend the Minister very well; I have met him to talk about these issues previously. I am sure that I can rely on his answer, although how much he can reassure me is another matter.
	My remarks are entirely about the logistics of providing our armed forces with what they need at the right time. There is a great difference between fighting a war and the business of commerce. A letter of apology, a refund, or compensation after the goods do not arrive on time is fine in the world of commerce, but no use at all for armed forces at the front who rely on prompt delivery.
	At the beginning of the debate, the Secretary of State paid tribute to those who have lost their lives in Iraq. I therefore ask for hon. Members' forbearance while I make my final point. The one constituent of mine who lost his life serving his country in Iraq was David Clarke, who had barely reached his 19th birthday. He was serving in one of our Challenger 2 tanks, which was hit by a shell that another Challenger 2 tank had fired. I did not know David, but I went to the funeral and it was clear from the tributes on the day that he was a young man who was full of promise, very brave and committed to public service in the armed forces. He gave his life gallantly for this country. I should like to pay tribute to his family—his mother, father and younger brother—who have behaved with great dignity and fortitude throughout the shock, horror and grief that they have borne.
	Clearly, people in that position are worried about combat identification and want to know what the Government can say about reducing so-called friendly-fire fatalities in future combat. It would be helpful if, either today or later in writing, the Minister could bring me up to date on the Government's actions to meet the challenges of combat ID.

Hugh Robertson: It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Stafford (Mr. Kidney) and his tribute, which he was right to make. All hon. Members would do well to reflect on his words and the lessons that can be learned.
	I want to speak about what I believe to be the most important issue that affects British defence policy: our response to the events of 9/11. I should also like to consider the further implications for our defence policy. Before I do so, I want to put another matter on record. A great deal has been written—and said in the House—about the preparations for and the aftermath of the war in Iraq, but little has been said, even in the Chamber, about the fighting of that war.
	Whatever one's political view, everybody would agree that the campaign was an overwhelming success. I suspect that it will be studied in staff colleges throughout the world for many years as a model of its type. That reflects enormous credit not only on the armed forces who fought the war but on all those who were involved in its planning and support. I realise that times are difficult for the Secretary of State, but he and other Ministers—I include the Minister of State—can be justifiably proud of the role that the Ministry of Defence, and all the other defence institutions for which it is responsible, played; they did the country proud.
	Defence has changed enormously in the 22 years or so since I left school to join the Army. Given the scale of the changes, it is not surprising that defence policy has often appeared to chase the game, to use a sporting analogy. It has seemed to react to events rather than to predict the future and act accordingly. When I joined the Army, defence policy was entirely conducted in the predictable parameters—almost a straitjacket—of the cold war. That was the first phase of defence policy that I experienced.
	When we went through Sandhurst, people such as my hon. Friend the Member for Mid-Norfolk (Mr. Simpson) taught us the four pillars of UK defence policy. It is a great tribute to my hon. Friend that I remember them now. They were: defence of the UK home base, the overseas dependencies, NATO and our independent nuclear deterrent. It is clear that three of them related to the conduct of the cold war. We exercised endlessly against imaginary enemies, almost always organised on Soviet lines, and memorised their equipment. When I took over as adjutant of a main battle tank regiment in Germany in 1990, we were flown over the battle positions that our individual tanks were expected to occupy when the Red Army crossed the border. Everything was governed by the cold war.
	Even then, it was clear to us all that things were about to change. The night that the wall came down, I was a student at the junior division of the staff college. I vividly remember everybody gathering in the television room to watch those amazing scenes from Berlin. We knew then that a new age of defence policy was about to begin.The end of the cold war ushered in a new era of optimism. As many hon. Members have said this afternoon, there was talk throughout the west of a new world order, peace dividends and, of course, smaller defence budgets.
	The whole of my second year as an adjutant in Germany was spent preparing for "Options for Change", drawing up orders of battle involving smaller numbers, fewer squadrons and so on. That was an understandable reaction, but, as we now know, a wrong one. In fact, freed from the straitjacket of communism, the world became a rather more dangerous place. Sir Anthony Parsons, our ex-ambassador to the United Nations, put it brilliantly in his book about the first 50 years of that organisation, when he described the period as moving from cold war to "hot peace". Older ethnic, religious and territorial allegiances began to reassert themselves. Bitter conflicts broke out around the periphery of the old Soviet Union and across Africa. Defence planners then began to realise that the reductions made in the early 1990s had gone too far. The strategic defence review clearly sought to put that right.
	It is my personal view that the events of 9/11 usher in another new era of defence policy—effectively the third of my lifetime. Some preliminary work has clearly been done in the SDR new chapter, but I wonder whether we in this country have really begun to understand the implications of that momentous event. Indeed, I worry whether, psychologically, we in Britain have already begun slightly to dismiss the events of 9/11 as another of those disasters—natural or otherwise—that occasionally afflict the world. People in the United States have certainly not done so, however, as I saw on a recent British American Parliamentary Group visit, and we must not do so here.
	Before I examine the implications for UK defence policy, post-9/11 and the SDR new chapter, I want to say a few words about the new threat that we now face. We must recognise at the outset that al-Qaeda is a wholly new and entirely different type of enemy, whose leadership is dedicated to the overthrow of our state and, indeed, of our whole way of life, whatever the human cost. It does not seem to be so much a single, identifiable group as an umbrella organisation. It is a network of many different terrorist organisations and, critically, of rogue states. That network is spread right across the globe from north Africa through the middle east, Afghanistan and Pakistan down to south-east Asia. It is bound together very loosely by a loyalty to an extreme form of Islam and, critically, by a desire to attack the west, particularly America. If we are to defeat such a formless enemy and others like it, we will need a full range of responses considerably outside the scope of normal—in post-cold war terms—UK defence policy.
	What does that mean in practical terms? First, we need strong international institutions. My right hon. Friend the Member for Devizes (Mr. Ancram) has talked at some length about the need to repair fractured international institutions such as NATO, the UN and the EU. It is a tragedy that so many of them are divided at the very time when the need for them is greatest. Successful military operations demand clarity of command and control. I therefore hope that, for practical as well as ideological reasons, the Government will concentrate on re-forming and re-focusing NATO rather than devoting their energy to developing alternative structures in the EU, as they are at the moment.
	Secondly, we need to broaden the scope of our defence policy to react to the new and complex political military environment. Diplomatic, legal, humanitarian and international development responses will all be needed, and it is vital that we get the correct structures in place now. I shall give an example. Having seen the Iraqi army in 1991—pre-sanctions—I have always felt that the problems of rebuilding that country after the conflict would far exceed the problems involved in fighting the war. I was therefore disappointed, when sitting on the Front Bench in the summer, to hear the right hon. Member for Birmingham, Ladywood (Clare Short)—who was then still Secretary of State for International Development—say during the debate on Iraq on 4 June that the
	"preparations for the post-conflict situation were inadequate." —[Official Report, 4 June 2003; Vol. 405, c. 210.]
	If she is right—I have no reason to doubt her—that must simply never happen again.
	We must develop mechanisms that allow the UK's armed forces to react more speedily than existing readiness profiles and resourcing assumptions allow. UK forces will often have to be generated in very tight time scales and I am not convinced that those mechanisms currently exist.
	Thirdly, we will have to undertake a fundamental reappraisal of our defence relationship with the United States, especially in respect of procurement and training. We clearly must maintain an independent UK military capability, but, in practical terms, as the Secretary of State said, it is unlikely that we will ever again launch a major military operation without the support of the United States, which is the world's remaining superpower. Our forces clearly work well together at the moment, but it will be sensible to ensure, without compromising our independence, that both people and equipment are interoperable in future.
	Fourthly, we need to examine the balance and capabilities of our armed forces. We must look at the whole concept of expeditionary warfare and effects-based operations. Again, the Secretary of State said something about that earlier. When one is outside government, it is difficult to have an informed opinion, but it is my instinct—clearly, without the information, it can be no more than that—that the current threat level warrants an increase in our armed forces. If that is not possible, and I realise that there are budgetary constraints, their numbers should certainly not be cut to balance the budget. The operational requirements in Iraq, Afghanistan, the Balkans, Northern Ireland and across Africa simply do not allow that. I say to Ministers that they should remember the experience of the early 1990s, which I lived through as a soldier. It is very simple to reduce troop numbers, but it is incredibly difficult, and takes many years, to build them up again and, critically, to replace the experience that has been lost.
	The performance of UK military equipment in Afghanistan and Iraq was enormously reassuring. I heard one of the brigade commanders in Iraq describing the Challenger 2 main battle tank as the man of the match. Clearly, in both those conflicts, the Warrior and the AS 90 proved themselves to be battle-winning assets. It will not be a popular thing to say, but I think that we can agree that the Tomahawk cruise missiles performed extremely well. However, those operations illustrated other things. The new carriers are a vital focus for powerful amphibious operations. They need to be at the planned size both as a means of projecting our power across the globe and for their deterrent implications. They will also be needed at that size to cope with the new expanded role for defence policy.
	I visited HMS Ark Royal just after the start of the summer recess. Personnel there were enormously proud of the work they had done during operations in Iraq and enormously enthusiastic about the new carriers. The one message that they asked me to take back was: do not reduce the size.
	There is an ongoing need for heavy armour. I am always slightly nervous when I hear talk of cutting main battle tank regiments as though they were dinosaurs of the cold war: they are not. The role of the main battle tank in both Afghanistan and Iraq was crucial. Indeed, I am told that both 3 Commando Brigade and 16 Air Assault Brigade requested more heavy armour on a number of occasions to boost their combat power.
	There are clearly lessons to be learned on the role and deployment of attack helicopters. I hope that the lessons learned from both those conflicts will show that there is a role for tanks and helicopters; they are complementary, not alternative assets.
	We clearly need to look again and refine the procedures for close air support. I am afraid that my regiment discovered to its cost that that is not always what it should be. We need to improve assistance to allow aircraft to identify and to destroy targets while achieving the maximum amount of discrimination against civilian targets. The critical aspect, surely, is the question of balance. Please do not be tempted to reduce our heavy armoured capability to build up a lighter, more mobile role; given the current threat, both are necessary.
	One thing stands out above all those factors—the quality of the people in our armed services. I have already stated my personal view that the size of the armed forces should be increased as their commitments rise. However, they definitely need to be fully recruited at their current proposed levels. The SDR defined overstretch as trying to do too much with too little manpower, and we must face up to the fact that our armed forces are currently overstretched.
	In the new defence environment post-11 September, and allied to the changes in social values that have occurred in this country in the past 10 years, we need to look at the entire welfare, or G5, package and how it affects our servicemen and women. There is also the question of training. All three armed forces need regular, realistic and challenging training: ultimately, that is what saves lives. Because of the current level of commitment, our armed forces are not getting the necessary time to train between operations; ultimately, that is dangerous.
	I believe that the events of 11 September have changed the world and should usher in a new era of defence policy. The SDR new chapter has clearly made a start, but we need a fundamental defence review to address these issues. Among other things, such a review should certainly encompass the role of international institutions, with an emphasis on reorganising NATO, the question of the scope of the UK's defence policy, and the mechanism to bring together the diplomatic, legal, humanitarian and international development responses that will be required. It should look again at our defence relationship with the United States, particularly in terms of procurement and training. It should look at the reorganisation of our armed forces, with an emphasis on numbers and balance; that is the way to meet such a complex threat. But above all else, I hope that the first page of such a review will recognise that our servicemen and women are our most valuable assets and need protecting. Without them, without the qualities and professionalism that they bring, nothing in defence is possible.

Malcolm Savidge: I should like to develop certain themes that I mentioned in last month's defence debate, particularly terrorism, weapons of mass destruction and the world order. On terrorism, although I share some of Professor Sir Michael Howard's concern about the not wholly helpful use of the term "war on terrorism", I supported the campaign against terrorism and the military action in Afghanistan.
	Last month, I quoted what Professor Paul Rogers' report for the Oxford Research Group said about the campaign against terrorism. Today, I should like to refer to the International Institute for Strategic Studies' recently published edition of "The Military Balance". That publication shows the balance that one would expect of it, but warns us that in its view, as a result of the Iraq war, al-Qaeda has probably been strengthened, so as far as recruiting power, morale and operating capability are concerned.
	During the McCarthy era, the US hard right used to refer to its opponents as "Stalin's useful idiots". One might wonder whether today's US hard right are Osama bin Laden's useful idiots. We must surely agree that, as the IISS says, if Afghanistan and Iraq are not to become breeding grounds for future terrorism, it is of key importance that we address as a priority nation building and stability throughout those countries. If the handover to democracy is to be achieved quickly in Iraq, it is crucial that we seek maximum responsibility for the United Nations in whatever agreements are reached.
	It is also vital that we reunite the international community, sadly shattered as it is, in its campaign against terrorism. Of course, we must also seek international unity in our campaign to prevent proliferation of WMD in general and nuclear weapons in particular, as well as long-range missile technologies, whether to terrorists or states. Our primary means of doing so must be through the United Nations, and through arms control treaties. I fully recognise that the UN has many faults, though many of those of which it is accused by its member states are the fault of the member states themselves, not least the most powerful ones. Whatever its faults, it is the only UN that we have, and it is our only hope, so where it has faults, they need to be reformed. It is worth remembering the words of Henry Cabot Lodge, that the UN is
	"an organisation to prevent you going to hell, not created to take you to heaven."
	We should resist the arguments of the US hard right, who suggest that because the UN is not a perfect vehicle for taking us to paradise, it should therefore be discounted.
	Arms control treaties have their weaknesses too, but they have also had considerable successes. If we reflect on the success of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty in preventing proliferation and examine the expert forecasts of what was expected over past decades, we can appreciate that there are far fewer nuclear weapon states in the world than previously foreseen. Of course, there are all sorts of problems, such as dual-use technology, and the nuclear non-proliferation treaty underestimated the extent of potential diversion from civil nuclear programmes into the creation of nuclear weapons.
	Where there are weaknesses, our primary responsibility must be to strengthen the treaties and strengthen verification. I welcome the Bush Administration's recognition of that point in respect of additional protocols to the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, but I find it sad that they do not recognise its importance in respect of biological and toxic weapons. They should remember what a previous Republican President, Ronald Reagan, said: "Trust but verify".
	The non-proliferation regime urgently needs to be strengthened. Of course, some states are likely to cheat or act in defiance. The US neo-conservatives suggest that we should consequently look to counter-proliferation and a more militarily aggressive stance, involving military interdiction of the transport of materials, pre-emptive strikes and even pre-emptive war. It is not inconceivable that the international community could be forced to use such means, but I believe that they are so dangerously destabilising to the whole world community that they should be adopted only as an absolute last resort and if there is international consensus. The fear is that the neo-conservatives regard it as an early resort and want to adopt it either unilaterally or unilaterally with a posse of the willing. They see counter-proliferation as an alternative to non-proliferation, and that could undermine non-proliferation.
	Pre-emptive war is a particularly dangerous concept when it is based on flimsy intelligence evidence, on potential future weapons programmes, or on potential future alliances between states and hostile terrorist organisations with which those states have no current relationship. That gives almost carte blanche for nations to declare war against other nations. We should remember that a policy of pre-emptive attack could provoke more terrorism. I recall the figures provided by my right hon. Friend the Member for Manchester, Gorton (Mr. Kaufman) about the first year of the Sharon Government, who used precisely those policies. In that first year, the number of Israelis killed increased fourfold and the number of Palestinians killed was four times as great again.
	Pre-emption can provoke proliferation, particularly if the Bush Administration stick to the policy of abandoning the negative security assurances given to the non-nuclear weapon states under the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. Pre-emption can also, of course, destabilise the world order. We shall have to deal with states that, as signatories to the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, are found to be cheating or in breach of it—states such as North Korea, for example. However, it should be done by means of diplomacy and international consensus.
	We have to strengthen verification to find out whether other states are more skilfully and more covertly trying to break a treaty to which they are a signatory, but we also have to deal with the non-signatory states. Far too often we do not talk about the problem of dealing with India, Pakistan and—perhaps most of all—Israel. The current position in relation to Israel encourages other middle eastern states to proliferate. Of course, the five nuclear weapons states must show their genuine commitment to fulfilling their obligations. The United Kingdom Government played an honourable role in the negotiations on the nuclear non-proliferation treaty in 2000, when we managed to gain a degree of international consensus that was not expected. However, the rest of the world would be justified in asking how genuine the nuclear states are being when they say that they wish to progress towards multilateral nuclear disarmament.
	In particular, the Bush Administration appear to be moving in the opposite direction on almost all the 13 agreements that were reached. Instead of strengthening the anti-ballistic missile treaty, they have abandoned it. They are trying to move away from the comprehensive test ban treaty. The Moscow treaty looks more like a public relations exercise than something that will lead to a genuine, irreversible reduction in weapons, as treaties such as the strategic arms reduction treaty would have done. New nuclear weapons programmes are being discussed that contemplate using nuclear weapons rather than having them as a deterrent, and I have already mentioned the situation on negative security assurances. The conference on disarmament in Geneva has been at a stalemate for far too long, with China blocking matters on fissile materials and the United States blocking matters on the weaponisation of space. It is a tragedy that nation states can show such urgency in rushing into war and so little urgency in trying to achieve a safer, more stable world.
	A stable future cannot be based on a single state imposing its will by military might. President Bush should remember that when his father spoke of "a new world order" he did not mean one state laying down the law for the rest of the world while breaking the rules itself. Indeed, President Bush should remember the words of an earlier president, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, who in 1961 said:
	"We must face the fact that the United States is neither omnipotent nor omniscient—that we are only 6 per cent. of the world's population—that we cannot impose our will upon the other 94 per cent. of mankind—that we cannot right every wrong or reverse every adversity—and that therefore there cannot be an American solution to every world problem."
	The US neo-conservatives have ruthlessly exploited the hideous tragedy of 11 September to push forward their own agenda. The real lesson of 11 September is that no nation can enjoy unilateral invulnerability as a result of military power and technology. On the contrary, the security of each nation must depend on the common international security of us all. In a world in which we cannot un-invent nuclear weapons, and given that human ingenuity could invent even more destructive weapons, we urgently need to create a world order that reduces conflict and its causes.

Angus Robertson: I am pleased to be able to speak in today's debate, having missed the last opportunity because I had to attend a Committee that was discussing the common fisheries policy, which is a matter of supreme importance to the many hundreds of my constituents who face job losses in that industry. Defence is also an important policy area and that is why I am pleased to make my contribution today.
	The importance of defence was brought home to me last week when, with other right hon. and hon. Members, I attended the remembrance service at St. Paul's. I attended on behalf of the Scottish National party and Plaid Cymru and I fully associate myself with the comments of the Secretary of State for Defence and other hon. Members and the condolences expressed to family members who have lost loved ones.
	The importance of defence was also reinforced last week when I had the good fortune to tour the majority of Scotland's defence establishments and units, including the Army at Craigiehall and Stirling, the Territorial Army at Forthside, the Navy on the Clyde, the Royal Air Force at Leuchars, and the Highlanders, which is the regiment that recruits in my constituency. I have already written to the Under-Secretary of State asking him to pass on my thanks, but I should like to express my gratitude again now.
	The tour was characterised by the extraordinary generosity with time shown by officers and men and women in all the establishments I visited. I am very grateful to them, and I am also grateful to the Minister and the MOD staff who made it all possible. In all the establishments there were reports of men and women who continue to serve in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. I echo others in paying tribute to all those deployed personnel, and to their families back home. Regardless of political affiliation, there is sincere appreciation of the work of service personnel, which is shared by the SNP and Plaid Cymru.
	I want to begin by talking about issues relating to the world as it is, rather than as I want it to be. The first concerns Scottish regiments. It was raised time and again, in discussions last week, by service men and women and their officers who are greatly concerned about the future of various historic Scottish regiments. Ministers are, I know, aware of the considerable unease among serving and retired regimental personnel who fear that the ongoing MOD review will lead to a spending shift that could have a negative impact on current regimental structures.
	That unease is also felt in traditional recruiting areas. In Moray, for example, hundreds of signatures were collected in a couple of weeks by The Northern Scot newspaper demonstrating support for the Highlanders. This comes at a time when recruitment to the regiment has been particularly successful, so any threat to its existence is seen as leading inevitably to a reversal of that success. I realise that as the review is ongoing Ministers are unlikely to commit themselves to the preservation of any particular unit, but it would be useful to know what time scale the Government envisage with regard to the publicising of their intentions, so that minds can be put at rest.
	Speaking of time scales, let me return to the issue of contractorisation in the airfield support services project. The Secretary of State has confirmed that plans to privatise the defence fire service as part of the ASSP have been postponed. Originally, in reply to a question that I asked earlier in the year, the Minister of State said that the Government would make an announcement in October. The Secretary of State has told us that that had been delayed, and the Transport and General Workers Union says it expects an announcement to be made at the beginning of next year. Will the Minister of State now explain the reason for the delay and tell us in which month an announcement will be made and what issues are holding things up? It should be borne in mind that the implementation of the conclusions of the 2000 fire study would already be saving taxpayers' money and retaining the flexibility of current arrangements.
	Perhaps the delay is due to the MOD's intention to decouple the defence fire service privatisation from that of the ASSP. I sincerely hope so. I know that my view commands support across the House: many Labour Members also oppose the privatisation of the defence fire service. We know that 30 DFS personnel have been serving in Iraq in recent months and performing key tasks, including the training of the Iraqi civilian fire service. We are all well aware of the dangers in Iraq, which affect not just service personnel but units and services such as the defence fire service. One DFS member has died on duty in Iraq. I think it wrong to contractorise a service that is so close to the front line. I hope that the MOD will listen to DFS members in my constituency and throughout the United Kingdom, and will not proceed with the privatisation.
	A number of Members have raised the issue of homeland defence. I, too, believe that the Territorial Army and the part-time Air Force and naval personnel perform a vital role. That was highlighted by my namesake, the hon. Member for Faversham and Mid-Kent (Hugh Robertson), who spoke of the results of 11 September and the plans to introduce civil contingency reaction forces to deal with such disasters. I was very reassured to hear that the TA in Scotland appears to be on course to recruit the target of 500 personnel for both units, but is the Minister of State content that the financial support for the project is adequate? I was told by TA members recently about their concerns over equipment and access to transport for exercises.
	On a related issue, will the Minister say whether the MOD is considering introducing pensions for TA members as part of the pensions review? The TA's status appears to be second class compared with that of the reserve firefighters, who do receive a pension. At a time when we are supposed to be looking for imaginative ways to recruit and retain TA personnel, the question of introducing a pension is important.
	My last point about the way the world is rather than the way we would like it to be has to do with a matter specific to my constituency—the relocation of search and rescue services from RAF Lossiemouth to new, purpose-built accommodation at RAF Kinloss. The Minister will be aware that D Flight of 202 Squadron, with its two Sea King helicopters, is set to make that move in May 2005, and that building work is due to start next April. The decision follows the completion earlier this year of a two-year option study by the MOD, which concluded that the squadron should join the rescue services already based at RAF Kinloss.
	RAF Kinloss is home to the aeronautical rescue co-ordination centre, which controls the military response to emergencies over an area of 1 million square miles. It is also home to the RAF's busiest mountain rescue team, and Nimrod aircraft from the base carry out an average of 52 rescue missions every year. I have gone on record as welcoming the move, with the proviso that its effect on RAF Lossiemouth will be clarified. I sincerely hope that the change will enhance the station's search and rescue capacity, by bringing the main relevant units together on one base. I hope that the Minister will confirm that the change will do nothing to alter RAF Lossiemouth's long-term operational prospects. People in Moray would appreciate a comment on that.
	I shall keep my remaining remarks brief as I know that other hon. Members want to speak, but I want to deal with the world as I should like to see it. The hon. Member for North Essex (Mr. Jenkin), the Conservative spokesman, spoke about his desire for a sovereign, independent defence policy for the UK. I agree that that is something that all normal countries should have, although I doubt that Unionist Members in other parties would share my desire that my country should exercise its own sovereign and independent defence policy, with decisions made in Scotland.
	That is what normal countries do—they decide whether they should send their young men and women into conflict. I should like my country to be normal in that respect and able to make such choices in future. Scotland can build on a proud fighting and peacekeeping tradition. Scottish units could offer a more stable life to service families, which would be based in one area for their service careers. They could offer service personnel the same sort of peacekeeping experience available in the UK forces, but without the strains of overstretch. Also, a purely Scottish defence policy could guarantee that the salaries of service personnel would be spent in the Scottish economy. It would ensure that Scotland remained free of nuclear weapons, and that defence industries would be able to continue in a stable democracy.
	That is the world as I should like it to be in Scotland. I want my country to become a normal country, making normal decisions about sending our young men and women into conflict. If that had been the case earlier this year, Scottish service men and women would not have had to fight in a conflict that was not sanctioned by the UN.

Huw Irranca-Davies: I am pleased to contribute to a debate that has contained some thoughtful and intelligent contributions from all parts of the House. Earlier, my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State mentioned that flexibility was now the key word. I agree, and contend that responsiveness is also vital. Other hon. Members have spoken about NATO and other organisations, but I want to comment briefly on the role of the UN. I am not one of the detractors who say that the United Nations is broken and cannot be fixed. The UN is bruised and its often quoted unique legitimacy needs to be restrengthened.
	In a debate such as this, there is a temptation to reflect solely on the incidents in our immediate history—those that are still ongoing in Iraq. I want to broaden the discussion. The United Nations is a unique institution. What it decides to do and the responsiveness and flexibility of its decisions and actions have an immediacy of impact on the role of NATO, European reaction forces and United Kingdom troops.
	I welcome the work that the Defence Committee has done on the strategic defence review and the new chapter, in particular the focus on terrorism. That work echoes a new realisation within the UN. I think that Kofi Annan has seen that, despite his opposition to what happened in Iraq. He recognised that there is a case to be made for intervention on humanitarian or conflict resolution grounds within states and over sovereign territorial borders. That is the world in which we now live.
	The UN can no longer take some effective action but, as on so many occasions, merely pass resolution after resolution hoping that something will come of it. It must make its work meaningful and be serious about acting upon it. That does not mean that military intervention or peacekeeping troops on the ground will be necessary in every instance.
	Like many other hon. Members and international observers, I would welcome a change in understanding in the UN. When resolutions are passed they must be taken seriously and they must be acted upon more speedily and with more flexibility where appropriate.
	I am not one of those who knock the UN. It has played a massive role ever since its inception. Since 1996, there have been 42 peacekeeping and observer missions worldwide. At present, 16 peacekeeping operations are under way. The UN has negotiated 172 peaceful settlements to various regional conflicts, including the Iran-Iraq war, the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan and in El Salvador. So, quiet diplomacy also has its role, but backed up by a serious intent and the use of military intervention where necessary.
	Humanitarian aid should not be overlooked. More than 30 million refugees in flight from war, famine or persecution have received aid through the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees since 1951. At present, more than 19 million refugees—mostly women and children—are receiving food, shelter, medical aid and sustenance through the UN.
	There is a critique of the United Nations, however. It has failed at moments of supreme crisis to act on the decisions that it has already taken. It has proved insufficient to the challenges that it has faced. Despite the high standards associated with the UN, in the hundreds of wars since 1945 it has authorised use of force only twice: the Korean war in 1950 and the Gulf war in 1991. That amounts to only two occasions in its entire history. That poor record of conflict prevention and resolution and enforcement action is a reflection on the UN. It colours perception of the UN throughout the world, including in present conflict situations, where any discussion of UN action is looked at askance, or with a smile or rebuke. Those of us who seriously believe in the role of the UN have to change that.
	I will deal with how we can move to that situation, but if we make the UN more responsive and flexible in its approach, that will have an implication for United Kingdom capabilities as well as European and international capabilities and the demands on them.

Colin Breed: Does the hon. Gentleman agree that one reason that there are so few UN-authorised actions is the regular imposition of the veto by certain countries? Is he suggesting that that should be reformed?

Huw Irranca-Davies: The hon. Gentleman brings me to that point a little earlier than I had intended. Yes, there should be a review of the use of the veto. That is reflected not only in what has happened in the recent past but also much further back. Indiscriminate use of the veto can lead not only to lethargy but to inertia in decision making while in some areas of the world people are losing their lives.
	Iraq has already been mentioned. We could also consider Afghanistan. In the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, the UN neither backed nor prevented the war and, in retrospect, changed its mind. In Rwanda in 1994, there was a failure to act while genocide was going on. There is a lack of intervention in current situations, for example, in the Congo, the great lakes region or Liberia—a country that turned, inevitably, to the US. The UN fails to enforce many of its resolutions and to act in moments of crisis.
	As I said, troop commitments are not required in every case, but the inertia is striking. When people are losing their lives and major human rights abuses are taking place, the UN needs to put across the message that it can be more proactive and dynamic when appropriate. The message should resound across the international community that the UN is serious about stepping in when that is needed.
	The use of the veto is often not governed by considerations driven by the international fraternity, or sorority, but by national interests, such as energy. That has happened not only in the immediate past. A range of countries has been guilty of indiscriminate use of the veto, or of threatening its indiscriminate use. The US is often mentioned, although it is not the only one, but we can certainly cite it in terms of the Cuban blockade and its belated refusal to condemn Halabja. We can cite Russia in relation to Afghanistan and Kosovo, and so on.
	Current processes in NATO and the composition of the Security Council favour certain countries. They also favour countries that can deploy certain resources; in effect, the NATO countries. Should that be so? In a new century, should it be primarily the post-1945 make-up of the Security Council that determines how the UN makes its decisions?The composition of the Security Council and its decision making alienate much of the developing world. That is unfair and it needs reform. It damages the whole concept of multilateralism.
	I began my contribution by developing the theme of what the UN has actually achieved. Those achievements are significant, but because the UN has failed to act in moments of supreme crisis it now appears to some people—although I am not one of them—as merely a talking shop. Its decision making is flawed. It is seen, at best, as a creature of the permanent members, with misuse, or threatened misuse, of the veto.
	If the use of the veto is to be reviewed and reformed, that use should be delicate. It should be used to cut through problems as a surgeon uses delicate instruments in an operation. It should not be used as a sledgehammer or a chainsaw, as has so often been the case.
	The developing world deeply distrusts the UN as a peacekeeper. How can we achieve reform? As the hon. Member for Faversham and Mid-Kent (Hugh Robertson) and other hon. Members have pointed out, if we want the UN to have a better speed of response and to be willing to act where appropriate—which is essential—that will have an effect on troop capabilities and demands on different nations. The decision-making process needs streamlining and the institutions restructuring to some extent.
	One suggestion—I do not say that it is the only way forward—is that seats should be found on the Security Council for regional or sub-continental areas, which would have an implication for our representation as well. Another suggestion is to reform the veto and consider majority voting. Greater transparency is essential. Non-permanent members are regularly excluded from the real negotiations. For example, in the run-up to adopting resolution 1441, non-permanent members of the Security Council had to consult the New York Times to see the draft resolutions. So information needs to be passed to all the nations represented at the UN.
	I began by mentioning Kofi Annan. In an interview in the Financial Times earlier this year, he was quoted as saying:
	"If the challenges we now face have changed, the responses must also change. We must be able to adapt our institutions and structures to deal with that. I'm not sure that the organs of the organisations are working in an optimum fashion."
	I agree with that. We need to increase legitimacy and develop representation for all members of the UN.
	In conclusion, I ask a simple and straightforward question to the Secretary of State, as we consider a review of how we deploy and assess the current and future capabilities of UK forces, as well as our interaction with European partners and multilateral partners worldwide: what impact would a reformed, more proactive, more flexible UN have on those capabilities?

Crispin Blunt: I do not want to follow the hon. Member for Ogmore (Huw Irranca-Davies) down the road of UN reform; I want to focus rather more directly on British defence policy itself. First, I want to commend to the House the excellent speech by my hon. Friend the Member for Faversham and Mid-Kent (Hugh Robertson). I should have liked to make such a speech, and I commend its details to the Minister. He will know, as I do, with what authority my hon. Friend speaks on these matters, and he had some proper and extremely wise advice for the Government on the detail of the application of defence policy, particularly the complementary use of heavy and light capability, as the Secretary of State referred to it.
	There is, however, one detail on which I should like to depart from what my hon. Friend said. In fact, it is not really a detail; it is a rather central point in his analysis of what has happened to British defence policy. I disagree with him that the events of 11 September were a fundamental turning point for the United Kingdom. They were a fundamental turning point for the United States, and that has had significant consequences for the United Kingdom, but the reshaping of British defence policy in 1990–91, at the end of the cold war, was the most significant event for us.
	Obviously, through the 1990s, when I was a special adviser in the Ministry of Defence, there was a certain amount of settling down in that process and the adding back of a certain number of infantry battalions when it became clear that the cuts at the end of the cold war had gone too far. Then we had the SDR when this Government came to power in 1997, which very largely confirmed the overall direction that defence policy had taken since Tom King's reforms.
	Those reforms have stood the test of time in a strategic sense, although not in a tactical sense, where changes have had to be made. The then Government were beginning to address the whole issue of asymmetric threats as part of the policy of being able to deploy forces overseas and having an expeditionary force capability, which was being built up during the 1990s.
	The Defence Committee stated in its report on the 1998 SDR that the Government had not paid enough attention to issues such as homeland security and asymmetric threats. Plainly, the Government's reaction in the form of the new chapter of the SDR shows that they have started to make progress in relation to the lessons of the events of 11 September. A wholesale change in British defence policy, however, will not be seen. Our policy was established to enable us to have an expeditionary force capability to intervene around the world to have some influence on those areas of the world from where these threats are emerging. The problem for British defence policy is that the Government accepted the framework that they inherited in 1997 and promptly took £500 million out of the budget in the first year. They have now started to add back a small real growth in the defence budget.
	Sitting watching British defence policy and the shape that the armed forces will have to take under those budgetary constraints, however, is like watching a slow-motion train crash. Any serious observer of defence who listened carefully to the Secretary of State's speeches—I am something of an aficionado of such speeches, having had something to do with them previously, and my hon. Friend the Member for Mid-Norfolk (Mr. Simpson) will be the same—will have heard between the lines a Secretary of State preparing to administer very serious cuts inside the Ministry of Defence. That is simply because, on the existing budget, it will not be possible to obtain armed forces fully recruited at the establishment at which the Government now say that they aim, combined with providing two aircraft carriers with their aircraft and the full purchase of Typhoon. The equipment programme rolling forward is far too heavily loaded to be sustained by the funds that the House is currently voting and intends to vote for defence under the Government's comprehensive spending review plans.
	We can hear the words of the Secretary of State indicating that cuts will come. We have heard the rumours of cuts in Scottish infantry battalions. I went through all that in 1992–93 with the debate about the end of the Gordon Highlanders, with all the pain that that caused before the Highlanders were formed, and we can hear that debate happening again. We can hear in the words of the Secretary of State, if we listen carefully, the defence pips beginning to squeak.
	In my brief remarks, I want to warn the non-experts and the people outside the defence establishment—I suspect that the defence establishment knows perfectly well what will happen—that we are about to have another series of defence crises, as the Government, as usual, try to get a quart out of a pint pot. The timing for the Ministry of Defence, of course, is absolutely lousy. As it needs more money, the Government are running out of it. The fiscal position of the Government is heading south in a tearing hurry—we have already heard about the Chief Secretary sending notes round to spending Departments making it clear that the good days are over and that they cannot expect large increases in their budgets. In terms of the Government's fiscal position, the next two or three years look as if they will be extremely tight, which is usually extremely bad news for the Ministry of Defence.
	In the end, it will come down to the Prime Minister. He has deployed the armed forces overseas on numerous occasions and has set the tone that the Government have taken in deploying British troops around the world to Sierra Leone, to the Democratic Republic of the Congo—admittedly only a small force, thank goodness, due to the insistence of the chiefs of staff on avoiding getting anything more than a fingernail into that particular mangle—and to the Balkans and Iraq, which look like endless commitments. In the debate during the next year or so about public expenditure, the Prime Minister must give the Ministry of Defence the funds to sustain the operational capability of the armed forces at the establishment and with the forward equipment programmes that the Government are currently planning. If they do not, we will probably yet again face a round of salami slicing. The danger is that that will happen on the back of all the pressure that has been placed on all the men and women of the armed services. For a long while, they have been able to sustain enormous operational pressure, but that cannot go on for very much longer.
	The Chief of the Defence Staff and the other Chiefs of Staff are warning about the degrading of training because of the huge commitment to operations. The armed forces need time and money to recover their capability. If they do not receive that, an institution of which the United Kingdom can properly be enormously proud will waste away under the twin fiscal and operational pressures to which the Government are subjecting them.
	I hope that the Secretary of State's words were part of his negotiating position with the Treasury and the Prime Minister. I hope that the Secretary of State and his Department can rely on the Prime Minister's support in the negotiations on expenditure that will take place over the next few months.

Keith Simpson: It is a great pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Reigate (Mr. Blunt). He slept through my lectures at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, as did my hon. Friend the Member for Faversham and Mid-Kent (Hugh Robertson). Although he has probably disappeared for a wee dram, I think that the spokesman and military adviser for the Scottish National party was another of my boys. I like to spread my expertise widely. Someone on the Labour Benches is probably also among that group.
	We heard 10 contributions in the debate and, in their own way, they were all interesting and rich. Their common theme was a genuine warmth and respect for our armed forces and the role that their personnel play. That is a most constructive and important tone.
	It was a pleasure to hear the hon. Member for Blaenau Gwent (Llew Smith). It was like a walk down memory lane. He was like a first world war sweat trying to bring back happy memories of open warfare in 1914 before going over the top on the Somme. It was a pleasure to hear him talk about nuclear weapons and nuclear proliferation. He is out of step with nearly all the main parties, but he has genuine heartfelt views.
	The hon. Member for South-East Cornwall (Mr. Breed) is standing in for the hon. Member for Hereford (Mr. Keetch). I trust that nothing has happened to the latter in the Liberal Democrat reshuffle and that he has not been sent into the outer darkness. [Interruption.] The Minister mutters something naughty from a sedentary position.
	It is interesting that the hon. Members for South-East Cornwall and for Vale of Glamorgan (Mr. Smith) both talked about ESDP as a means of conducting defence within more frameworks. The hon. Member for Vale of Glamorgan suggested that it would enhance security and, without wishing to start more rabbits running, I must say that many in the House and, I suspect, Ministers as well are a little sceptical—to say the least—about that. The problem is that enhancement may take place to the detriment of the proven track record of NATO.
	The speech of the hon. Member for Vale of Glamorgan was full of good old Welsh stump politics. He is a loyal supporter of the Government and, if I were in central casting, I would choose him to play someone speaking on behalf of the Labour party in the House of Commons in the 1920s or 1930s. It was great stuff.
	My hon. Friend the Member for North Wiltshire (Mr. Gray) is a former Front-Bench defence spokesman. He spoke forcefully for his constituents at Lyneham. They know that they have a doughty fighter working on their behalf. He also raised important issues for members of the Territorial Army, including their conditions of service, their pay and the role of their employers.
	My hon. Friend mentioned his essay on the use of the royal prerogative to go to war. I am happy to volunteer to mark it on behalf of the Royal College of Defence Studies—I am sure that it is worth a beta plus at least. He made a serious point about the role of Parliament, which I am sure that the House will want to debate on another occasion.
	The hon. Member for Stafford (Mr. Kidney) spoke warmly in support of RAF Stafford and the base at Donnington. He raised an important point about logistics and the private-sector ethos of "just in time" that has been introduced into the armed forces. I have said in previous debates that "just in time" could become "just too late". Although "just too late" might cause business problems and loss of money in the private sector, it can mean something far worse in military operations.
	I agree with the praise that my hon. Friend the Member for Reigate gave to my hon. Friend the Member for Faversham and Mid-Kent, who spoke warmly and with great knowledge about the military expertise of our armed forces and the danger of changing the balance in our armed forces to the extent that things that we take for granted, such as the heavier side of our Army, could be thrown out. I concur with his comment—I shall use my shorthand—that there is no doubt that throughout military history, sweat has saved blood. We reduce the training level of our armed forces at our peril.
	The hon. Member for Aberdeen, North (Mr. Savidge) made a thoughtful speech about the origins of terrorism and emphasised the role of the United Nations. I do not agree with his comments about the United States of America—he is a little over-critical.
	The hon. Member for Moray (Angus Robertson) spoke on behalf of the Scottish National party. He rightly said that defence was important and spoke up for the interests of the Scottish defence establishment. I shall perhaps leave the debate between him and Scottish Labour Members about Scottish independence for another debate.
	The hon. Member for Ogmore (Huw Irranca-Davies) spoke mainly about the role of the United Nations but raised an important point about the limits of humanitarian interventionism. My hon. Friend the Member for Reigate rightly focused on the major problem of the relationship between resources and the commitments that the armed forces face now and, crucially, those that they will face in the next two or three years.
	The debate takes place against the background of continuing operations in Iraq, the hiatus over the Hutton inquiry and the defence White Paper, which we hope will be published before the autumn. Post-conflict operations in Iraq are dependent on several factors that are beyond the control of the United Kingdom Government or, indeed, our armed forces. There is still no sign of Saddam Hussein, and I suspect that without his capture or death, elements in Iraq will be encouraged to continue the kind of conflict that they are carrying out. We are yet to discover weapons of mass destruction, and if we are unable to discover them it will continue to cause much scepticism among a large section of the British public. The final factor, of course, is the policy of the United States Government because we are the junior partner.
	I shall say a few words about the Hutton inquiry. Yesterday, quite rightly, the Secretary of State said that he accepted responsibility for the actions of the Ministry of Defence and his departmental officials. I am old fashioned because I assume that the right hon. Gentleman is a right hon. Gentleman and that whatever the outcome of the inquiry he will take responsibility for those actions. More significantly, the inquiry has revealed in great detail the workings of modern government, which we would otherwise not have known for some 30 years. That raises questions about the way in which the Government conduct business. To an extent, we have seen government by sofa and informal relationships have perhaps led to decisions not being taken properly. That is something on which the Government and Parliament need to reflect.
	My concern is that the Hutton inquiry, combined with the continuing failure to find weapons of mass destruction, has encouraged great scepticism among the public about British government, which should concern all of us—not just the current party in government, but the rest of us as well. There is great scepticism about the role and integrity of our major offices of state and our intelligence services. That concerns me because it may well be that in the next few months, or in a year or two, God forbid, the present Government or another Government come to the House and to the public with claims that there is a clear and immediate threat, and the public will be sceptical or will just not believe them. That affects not just the reputation of the present Government. It is a matter for all of us.
	I turn to the defence White Paper that we expect in the autumn. It will be a crucial White Paper. Apart from anything else, it will test the Government's commitment to defence and it will—in the words of the Secretary of State—be about change,
	"not change for its own sake, but essential change, modernization and new thinking in defence".
	I shall take as my text not the speech that the right hon. Gentleman made to the House today, which was good up to a point, but rather bland. I recommend to all right hon. and hon. Members the lecture that he gave at the Royal United Services Institute on 26 June this year, which is the detailed version of the speech that he gave this afternoon. It is far meatier and contains far more interesting ideas. Obviously, it saved the policy-making civil servants having to compose two speeches. I shall focus on the earlier speech, which is the one that we should have heard today.
	The speech is entitled "Britain's Armed Forces for Tomorrow's Defence", which I expect will be—surprise, surprise—the title of the White Paper. The right hon. Gentleman began his lecture by saying that he is frequently asked
	"why are Britain's Armed Forces so consistently successful in the wide range of tasks they undertake?"
	He comes to two conclusions in the lecture. The first—a point raised by many hon. Members—is the quality of our personnel and decisions taken by the MOD on how they are trained, organised, equipped and supported. The second is that the armed forces and the MOD are prepared to change and modernise. Most hon. Members would broadly agree with that, perhaps with the caveat that the MOD has a mixed track record on providing the resources for training, organising and supporting the armed forces, but I do not wish to be churlish about that.
	I would add two other reasons behind the success of our armed forces recently. First, not only under this Government, but under previous Governments, our armed forces have got used to making do with just enough and just in time. They are supremely practical applied people. They take the Duke of Wellington's knotted string approach to dealing with military problems, but I suspect that, as my hon. Friend the Member for Reigate said, we are just about getting to the end of the knotted string.
	Secondly, our armed forces are now trained to operate and fight jointly and multi-nationally, as successive Governments have emphasised. The UK has always been at its most effective when it has been in effective coalitions. His Grace the Duke of Marlborough and His Grace the Duke of Wellington knew how to work coalitions—the right coalitions, not sham coalitions.
	In his lecture, the Secretary of State outlined the need to change and modernise across the whole spectrum of defence. He referred to military structures, headquarters, organisations, weapons, equipment and personnel. He spoke in greater detail about effects-based operations—that is, the ability to deliver critical effect at the right moment. What did the right hon. Gentleman mean by that? He stated:
	"Measuring the capability of our Armed Forces by the number of units or platforms in their possession will no longer be significant."
	Although that sounds good in theory, the problem for us as parliamentarians and, indeed, for the armed forces is that only through their deployment and operations will we be able to assess their capability. How will the MOD or the Treasury assess that capability? What comparative indicators can be used against other countries, let alone against the threats posed by international terrorists? I hope that that core element of the defence White Paper will be considered by the Select Committees on Defence and on the Treasury and by the Public Accounts Committee.
	The Secretary of State said:
	"At the heart of effects-based operations are people."
	We all agree on that. Those people will be required as never before to have initiative, flexible skills and state-of-the-art technology. Can the Ministry of Defence recruit, train and retain such high-quality personnel in a market where many in the private and public sectors will be looking for the same kind of people? That is an enormous challenge, and as yet I have not heard an answer to how it is to be done.
	He said that there is a need to restructure the armed forces to deal with
	"the more frequent demands of concurrent medium and small scale operations"
	and to act as "multipliers of combat power". The logic of those changes will have an impact on our military organisations, including regiments—not their regimental cap badges, but the way in which they are structured—and on the way in which the RAF and the Royal Navy organise their platforms. I hope that the White Paper will provide some detail on how that will be achieved in practice. If the Secretary of State is correct about the tempo of operations, as I think he is, what impact will that have on service personnel and their families? More frequent operations in less traditional military units will place an even greater stress on armed forces personnel.
	What does that mean for the defence budget? The Secretary of State claims that the 2002 spending review settlement provides an additional £3.5 billion and that the defence budget is rising. The Library assessment tells us that since 1997 the share of gross domestic product spent on defence has fallen from 2.7 per cent. to 2.2 per cent. The current financial position is that in real terms UK defence spending is about £1 billion less than in 1996–97. As my hon. Friend the Member for Reigate and other hon. Friends said, there is already a serious crisis in the defence budget without the major changes that the Secretary of State seeks. For the purpose of the debate, however, let us assume that £3.5 billion is the correct sum.
	The Secretary of State says that that money has to be used for reform and modernisation. In his lecture, he said:
	"But it would be a failure of ambition simply to invest the new money in new systems while carrying on as before with the rest."
	He continued:
	"So in the forthcoming planning round"—
	this is the guts of the issue—
	"I will be asking our Top Level Budget holders to think radically".
	A dreadful keening noise was heard from the senior military and civil servants sitting in his audience, because they all know that "thinking radically" means: "There is no money in the pot, the Treasury is after us again, and you guys have got to come up with an answer that will make it look as though we are not cutting." He went on to say that their outputs will be delivered "partly by setting them"—wait for it—
	"some stiff 'stretch' targets as they are known in the acquisition world."
	However,
	"These targets are not decisions. And this will not be a 'cuts' exercise."
	I do not know who wrote this, but I suspect that they could earn a tremendous amount of money in the private sector—in fact, they probably do.
	The Secretary of State continued:
	"The aim will be to give us options—planning flexibility. At the end of the process, we will make decisions. In some areas, investment will go down; in others, it will go up—perhaps significantly."
	The House of Commons expects the Secretary of State not to repeat that verbiage in the White Paper but to give answers about what the stretch targets are. Will we have a decision or will there be a continuing exercise? Many of us suspect that the comments are cover for further cuts. That will be disastrous for defence spending.
	I do not know whether the Minister of State will pick up a point that several hon. Members made about combating terrorism, especially in the context of ballistic missile defence. That is always a slightly embarrassing subject for the Government, not because of Conservative Members but because of Labour Back Benchers. Will the defence White Paper spell out in detail the programme in which the United Kingdom will participate in conjunction with our American allies and how much it will cost?
	Several hon. Friends, including my hon. Friend the Member for North Wiltshire, mentioned my next point. The Government are rightly worried about a major terrorist incident in the UK. However, we are genuinely concerned about the lack of political direction and co-ordination at the heart of Government. The Prime Minister has an outstanding man in Sir David Omand in the Cabinet Office. He is a sort of Sir Maurice Hankey, but with a sense of humour. Despite the training and exercises that the Government have carried out, I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Faversham and Mid-Kent that public opinion, let alone our armed forces and emergency services, is neither psychologically nor operationally prepared for an equivalent of 9/11. I do not know how people can be prepared for such an eventuality, but the action that has been taken so far is not sufficient. I am especially worried about the role of the civil contingency units. We were promised greater details about that but they have not emerged.
	The defence White Paper will be crucial. I applaud much of the Government's thinking—we cannot stand still and there must be change. However, I believe that the Government's comments act as a cover for their inability to deliver a budget to tackle current defence commitments, let alone the great investment in personnel that will be required to deal with network-centric warfare and all the major procurement programmes. Unless the Government can make a convincing case, they will fail to persuade not only Members of Parliament but the public who elected them.

Adam Ingram: I thank all hon. Members for their contributions. The hon. Member for Mid-Norfolk (Mr. Simpson) did himself a disservice when he said that he used to send people to sleep. He did not send me to sleep because he quoted so extensively from that wonderful piece that the Secretary of State delivered. It kept me awake, as it did the first time that I heard and read it. It is worth revisiting and the hon. Gentleman was right to alight on it because it makes important points, on which I shall elaborate.
	In setting our defence policy, we are conscious that its terms will shape not only the type of operations that we plan to be able to mount but the scope and nature of our procurement programmes far into an uncertain future. Our policy has a significant effect in declaring where and how we plan to operate and exert our influence in the world. It also declares to our allies and adversaries our assessment of the circumstances in which we will operate alone, with NATO, in an ESDP structure or in coalitions of the willing, and the scale of those commitments.
	It is critical that our defence policy is based on a rigorous assessment of the nature of the risks that we face, and that it suggests how they may develop in time. Those judgments focus our attention on organisations or nations that are likely to pose the greatest risk to our interests, now and in future.
	All that gives us a clear picture of the capabilities needed to match and defeat the challenges ahead, but I need not remind the House that defence capability has two components. One is matériel; the other involves the men and women who serve our country with such distinction. The people we need, and the training that they require to deliver the necessary capability, are changing. In particular, the expeditionary nature of operations and the increasing technological complexity of military equipment are placing unprecedented demands on our people. We owe it to them to ensure that our evolving requirements are adequately reflected in what we believe to be a far-sighted and coherent defence policy that will sustain the vitality, professionalism, skill and reputation of our servicemen and women. As many hon. Members have pointed out, getting that right cannot be regarded as a simple science.
	Events have shown that we should not ignore the probability of the unexpected. Accordingly, our defence policy must be alert and responsive to the shocks and crossroads in international affairs that we might encounter. Of necessity, therefore, planning horizons are more ambitious, and while they must be based, in part, on experience, they must also accommodate a greater degree of uncertainty than was the norm in the closing decades of the last millennium. That means that we must always be prepared to re-evaluate our perceptions and predictions.
	The fact that the broad direction of the strategic defence review, in terms of deployability, mobility and expeditionary warfare, was the right one has been borne out by events. My hon. Friend the Member for Vale of Glamorgan (Mr. Smith) spoke graphically and forcefully on that subject. The hon. Member for Faversham and Mid-Kent (Hugh Robertson) made similar points. I notice that he is double-hatting in this debate. One minute he is on the Front Bench, the next he is on the Back Benches, and now he is on the Front Bench again.

Gerald Howarth: He is multi-skilled.

Adam Ingram: He may be multi-skilled, but he has been very well trained, leaving aside some of the lectures that he may have had to listen to in the past.
	The SDR new chapter provided the new focus of our response to the emerging threat of international terrorism. It built on the solid foundation of earlier work, and added emphasis to a rapidly evolving understanding of our security environment. The defence choices over the coming months will further shape the ability of our armed forces to meet the tasks that we will set in future. Those tasks change as the world around us changes. The greatest challenge that we now face is to predict and adapt to those changes quickly and effectively.
	The greatest risk that we face is that of failing to make a judicious assessment of the evolving need and, worse still, failing to enable our armed forces to make the required changes in configuration, equipment, and personnel policy. The Government have a responsibility to assess the challenges, and to enable the changes that will underwrite our defence in the future. This debate has reminded us, as every defence debate does, that our armed forces continue to be heavily engaged in the world, and the probability must be that this will not change in the near future.
	The majority of hon. Members have, as I would have hoped, taken the opportunity of today's debate to raise issues that bear upon some of the areas that I have just mentioned. I would like to deal with those points now. One of the central charges made by the hon. Member for North Essex (Mr. Jenkin) was that we have too many commitments and too few resources. I think that that sums up a major part of his contribution. What he did not say, however, was which commitments we should not have undertaken. [Interruption.] If people make the charge that we have too many commitments, they must face up to the responsibility of saying, "Not now. We cannot do this." In saying that we have too few resources, he should not do as he did at the Conservative party conference when he talked about "enough boots", "enough ships" and "enough aircraft". He should define what "enough" means, and tell us what our shortfall is. That is the way in which the Government can realistically be held to account. He should give us not some generalised statement of what could be good—a motherhood and apple pie philosophy—but a specific analysis and a specific commitment on those points.
	On the hon. Gentleman's point about over-commitment, should we not have made a contribution in Sierra Leone, the Balkans, Afghanistan or Iraq? The Conservatives had very strong views on Iraq. Indeed, they were saying that we should make a commitment in Iraq before we had even come to a conclusion on that issue. The resource pressures were there at that point in time. Now Conservative Members say that there is insufficiency of resources. They were arguing for the commitments. They have to take that on board.
	Another issue that the hon. Gentleman raised related to training. He referred to the July publication of the director of operational capability report. An earlier report was published in February. Both those reports were commissioned at my request. I asked the DOC to undertake the studies, and we made a conscious decision to publicise all the things that we discovered during that assessment, which was very much an in-depth assessment of the initial training regime, which perhaps had not been studied comprehensively, if at all, for many years. Clearly, that was required.
	The important aspect was that it identified key areas for improvement. Significantly, 42 out of the 60 actions that were identified have now been acted upon. I visited one of our major training establishments the other week to see what was happening. I met a lot of new instructors. Everyone told me what a wonderful change there had been in the culture, ethos, approach and the way in which training was handled. They knew that there was more to come and that there were probably better ways of doing it. I had to point out to them that we were at the beginning of the implementation of that assessment but that the important aspect was that there was commitment in that training regime.
	When I hear criticism of our training regime, I simply reflect on how many thousands have been put through that regime—tens of thousands over the past few years. We could not deliver in all those conflicts to the extent that we have if that machine were broken and failing the armed forces, in this case the Army. I say to hon. Members, when they make their central charge that there is something flawed in our initial training structures, that we could not be successful if that were the case. That does not mean that things cannot be improved. That is why I commissioned the DOC report and why we will continue to look for ways to implement it.
	The hon. Member for North Wiltshire (Mr. Gray) commented on the Territorial Army and the reserves issue. In an intervention, I set out the reason for the reduction of 2,000 about which we saw lurid headlines. The media did not come and ask us. They could have got a proper explanation but, sadly, they are more interested in lurid headlines, and others then take up the charge without saying to the MOD, "Give us the facts." I hope that the fact that I gave helps—I am sure that it helped the hon. Gentleman. The hon. Member for North Essex raised the matter, too but did not hear the explanation that was given.
	There is another interesting aspect. Again, if the TA were beginning to disintegrate because there was too much pressure on it, too many demands were made of it, or there were some fault lines in all this, we would begin to see a major problem in retention and recruitment. We are not seeing that. Over time, we have to study that but we are not seeing it at this point.
	Interestingly, 9 per cent. of the deployed Army reserves have applied to join the regular forces. I hear that the TA is fragile and beginning to disintegrate but TA members have now realised what a contribution they can make by committing themselves in a regular way. That is an indicator of strength, not weakness.
	I had the privilege of being in Ukraine recently, where 4 Para, a TA regiment, was training alongside our Polish and Ukrainian friends. Some of them had just come out of Iraq, but where did they want to go? Back to Iraq. I was surprised. There were professional people there. There was a joiner, a plumber, people who could earn substantial money in the private sector, but they wanted to commit themselves in that way, so it is not all doom and gloom. I do not believe even for one moment that there is a weakness in the way in which the TA is currently responding to the demands that are placed on it. Again, we will have to assess that over time.
	The hon. Member for North Essex asked about the cost of Operation Telic. I do not know how many parliamentary questions I have answered on that but the current net cost is running at £700 million against a predicted budget of £1 billion. Further costs for the year 2002–03 are currently being assessed, and will of course be published in due course. We have made it clear that we are committed to achieving our objectives in Iraq, and the budget and financial support is important in that regard.
	I turn to the points made by the hon. Member for South-East Cornwall (Mr. Breed). Other Members have said that he may have been elevated in the recent reshuffle—[Interruption.] He is shaking his head. I pass on my best wishes to his predecessor, the hon. Member for Hereford (Mr. Keetch), who will obviously be back on the Front Bench at some point. The hon. Member for South-East Cornwall raised at least two important points, the first of which concerned pensions. Although the issue of pensions does not relate strictly to defence policy, I can see how a connection could be made. The accusation is that we are cutting pensions, but the service pension has not been reduced—it will still be worth 50 per cent. after 35 years, with a tax-free lump sum of three times the pension. Personnel will also have scope to accrue further benefits if they serve for longer.
	It is true that we will no longer provide an early immediate pension, as this would not be consistent with the expected Inland Revenue policy of not allowing pension benefits to be paid before the age of 55. We have to position ourselves in terms of future policy—otherwise, we will have to revisit this issue—and that is the sensible approach to take. However, we do intend to provide a replacement early departure scheme, which will offer similar benefits and structure, and provide support until the preserved pension and tax-free lump sum are paid out at the age of 65. [Interruption.] The hon. Member for South-East Cornwall looks perplexed, but before charging us with cutting pensions, he should read the written statement produced by one of my colleagues on 15 September, which dealt with some of those points.

Bernard Jenkin: Will the Minister give way?

Adam Ingram: I know that the hon. Gentleman allowed me to intervene on him, but I am trying to deal with the many points that were raised. If time permits, I shall certainly return to that issue. I am not being discourteous, but let me not be distracted from trying to deal with the points that were raised.
	The hon. Member for South-East Cornwall also mentioned manning control points, on which I have some statistics. Only three people left the Army in 2002 as a result of MCPs, and in the past four years there have been 209 MCP discharges. In the judgment of those who run the Army, MCPs are an essential tool for controlling its manning structure, and are used solely to maintain the structure's integrity. MCPs are a mechanism to retire those who have reached their ceiling, and who are preventing more able soldiers from being promoted. A judgment call has to be made, to ensure that the career paths of talented young people joining the forces are not being restricted. We handle sensitively those who are asked to leave under MCPs, and it is important to remember the statistics to which I have referred.
	My hon. Friend the Member for Vale of Glamorgan offered strong support for the strategic defence review and asked about ethnic recruiting. It is worth bearing in mind just how successful we have been in recruiting. The financial year 2002–03 was an excellent recruiting year: 26,220 new recruits were taken on, comfortably exceeding the target. Indeed, in recent years there has been steady, year-on-year progression. In 2001–02, the armed forces achieved 95 per cent. of their target; in 2000–01, the figure was 90 per cent.
	On ethnic recruiting, all three services have specialist teams whose aim is to promote armed forces careers to ethnic minority communities. According to unaudited figures for the first quarter of 2003–04, 446 people from ethnic minorities, including Commonwealth citizens, were recruited. However, the important point is the aim in achieving better results in this area. That aim is for each service to increase incrementally, each year for the next three years, the proportion of UK ethnic minority recruits—I stress UK ethnic minority recruits—by at least 0.5 per cent., with a tri-service aim of reaching 5 per cent. as soon as possible. We are undertaking several key initiatives to target that issue. It was also right to highlight the fact that, for whatever reason, inner cities are no longer the prime recruiting territory that they once were. To give an example, recent initiatives in London include the launch of the first mobile recruiting office—effectively a bus—which is operating within the M25 area. It enables recruiters to reach communities that have not always been accessible in the past. We are taking the campaign out to the communities, rather than having a static recruiting office.

Patrick Mercer: I heard with interest what the Minister said about recruiting successes, but will he deal with the point that was raised earlier? The Army is under-strength and recruitment is improving but recruitment capping figures have been announced for the infantry, the Royal Armoured Corps and the Royal Military Police. Will he explain why?

Adam Ingram: We have debated that matter before across the Dispatch Box and I thought that I had reached a point of understanding with the hon. Gentleman. We were highly successful in our recruiting campaign, but the training regime was set at a certain standard with a certain anticipation of numbers. We watched for a while as those numbers increased to see if there was a glitch and establish whether to respond with extra resources. A decision was taken some way down the line to do so because it looked as if the trend was upwards. We then had to staff the additional resources and take them from elsewhere. While we were doing that, we recognised that the armed forces—in this case the Army—were heavily committed. Judgment calls have to be made in the process, but it does not detract in any way from the importance that we place on recruitment. It is important to recognise the strength of our approach to recruiting and how successful we have been. There is no failure, but success. That is the important message that has to go out, together with recognition of how good the training regime has been.

Patrick Mercer: rose—

Adam Ingram: I am not going to give way.
	The hon. Member for North Wiltshire raised several issues, many of which related to the forthcoming White Paper. It is only proper to wait and see what it contains before conducting a fuller debate. He mentioned Lyneham, but I disagree with some of his comments about it. Irrespective of whether it closes, the number of RAF posts would have changed by virtue of the fact that the new aircraft type requires fewer people to service and maintain it. That explains part of the large reduction in the RAF footprint and we subsequently took the decision to locate in Brize Norton on grounds of the best strategic fit. We took account of all the associated risks, which were part of the review, and our best advice was different from his viewpoint. We were told that the risk was manageable.
	I can, however, give the hon. Gentleman a commitment on the reinstatement of the land and putting the base to other uses. We operate a good neighbour policy and I give my commitment to working closely with the local authorities and the planning agencies to ensure that we do the best that we can for the community—primarily because of the great contribution that RAF Lyneham has made over the years.
	Many other issues were raised in the debate—[Interruption.] If some hon. Members had not spoken for so long, I would have had more time to respond. I have already had to cut out a range of important responses.
	The hon. Member for North Wiltshire also mentioned reservists. The current banded rates for the standard award are as set out in a statutory instrument. Although the rates have not kept pace with the increase in civilian earnings, reservists can additionally claim a hardship award to cover essential outgoings. We recognise that that is not ideal and work is in hand to produce a new statutory instrument. The new scheme will take into account the statistical evidence arising from the mobilisation for Iraq. We are learning a valuable lesson.
	My hon. Friend the Member for Stafford (Mr. Kidney) raised many important points, but I do not have enough time to go into them all. He referred to three essential change initiatives that can produce major improvements. All the changes, if reflected in financial changes, will assist the front line. I understand that they will have an impact on the work force in the relevant establishments. I recently visited Donnington and met people from the Ministry of Defence in Stafford. I was able to give them some hopefully strong assurances about how we are handling this. My hon. Friend also asked about contact with the trade unions, and I met them on 18 September.
	I was hoping to say something about the contribution of the hon. Member for Moray (Angus Robertson). Scotland is a normal and a proud country. It is proud to be in the United—
	It being Six o'clock, the motion for the Adjournment of the House lapsed, without Question put.

MINEWORKERS' COMPENSATION

Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.—[Mr. Ainger.]

Kevan Jones: I am pleased to have secured this debate, and I thank Mr. Speaker for selecting this subject for debate this evening. It gives the House the opportunity to discuss the position of former surface workers of British Coal who are suffering from respiratory disease as a result of their exposure to coal dust at work. I know that many right hon. and hon. Members who represent coal mining or former coal mining constituencies will have constituents who are affected.
	The decision by the Government to sign, in September 1999, a handling agreement to cover compensation claims for dust exposure by coal miners was widely welcomed in many former mining constituencies such as mine of North Durham. The agreement set in place a scheme to compensate coal miners and avoid the expensive and protracted process of taking individual cases through the courts—a process that had been estimated to take between 15 and 20 years. The scheme has had its administrative problems, mainly because of the large numbers of claims, but many former miners are now being compensated for the damage that coal dust did to their health.
	According to the latest figures from the Department of Trade and Industry, more than £785 million has been paid out in compensation. In my constituency, just under £9.5 million has been paid out to former miners or their families. However, no amount of compensation can compensate individuals for the effect that coal dust has had on their health—the daily gasping for air—or the tragedy of watching a loved one die the agonising death that dust causes. I give the Government full credit for recognising the wrong done to those men and putting in place the current scheme, which, I must emphasise, has been welcomed in many constituencies.
	The majority of those exposed to coal dust were exposed while working underground. The compensation scheme covers those individuals, but it does not cover those who worked above ground and were often exposed daily to high levels of coal dust. They often worked in the processing of the coal or as blacksmiths, whose main job was on the surface, but often—sometimes daily—took them underground.
	The 1999 handling agreement resulted from a High Court case in January 1998, which was brought by underground workers who were exposed to coal dust. The High Court found in favour of six out of the eight claimants, but because all the claimants were underground workers, the Court never addressed the position of surface workers exposed to coal dust. When the handling agreement was signed in September 1999, it was accepted that the issue of potential exposure to coal dust on the surface would be resolved. The agreement even included a statement of intent to that effect.
	To underline further that commitment, the Department of Trade and Industry placed a minute before Parliament on 10 July 2000, which indicated that it was prepared to accept liability for those workers in dusty jobs on the surface. I have a copy of that minute before me and it is headed "Non-statutory liability to pay compensation to miners for exposure to surface dust". Paragraph 2 explains the liability that the DTI proposes to accept in respect of exposure to surface dust for employees at the surface of British coal mines. Paragraph 5 explains the reasons for accepting liability. It states that
	"exposure to dust on the surface leads to the same lung disease as dust underground".
	It continues:
	"The DTI have investigated the level of dust prevailing in surface jobs in British coal mines, measures which could have been taken to reduce dust and those which were taken.
	The DTI proposes to accept that British Coal did not fully meet its responsibilities towards certain categories of workers in dusty jobs on the surface".
	The minute is also clear about what the acceptance of liability means for claimants. Paragraph 8 states that
	"acceptance of this additional liability will mean that current claimants can extend their claim to cover time spent in dusty jobs on the surface and men who have only worked on the surface will be able to put in a claim".
	The reference to surface workers is so clear in that the word "only" is in bold type.
	Anyone reading the minute—which is signed by Ann Taylor, director of the coal health claims unit at the DTI—would probably conclude that surface workers exposed to coal dust could pursue claims for the damage to their health, but that is not the case. On 17 July 2000, the DTI retreated from its earlier clear position, as outlined in the minute. It is now prepared to compensate miners for chronic bronchitis, but not for the more debilitating conditions of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and emphysema. It asserts that, according to the available evidence, levels of coal dust on the surface were low and that if the measurements were accurate, the dose of dust received over a working life would be insufficient to cause loss of lung function causing long-term disability.
	That is a very different stance from the one adopted in the minute laid before the House in July 2000. It means that many thousands of surface workers who are suffering the debilitating effects of exposure to coal dust can no longer claim compensation—people such as Mr. Lynn, a constituent of mine in Chester-le-Street, a blacksmith employed by British Coal throughout his working life. Although his main job was on the surface, it took him underground regularly. Mr. Lynn has a medical report stating that he is suffering from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, but he is denied compensation because his is deemed to have been a surface occupation. He walked into my surgery gasping for air. He is clearly suffering the effects of his employment in the coal industry.
	Today my hon. Friend the Member for Caerphilly (Mr. David), who unfortunately cannot be here tonight, raised with me the case of a 90-year-old widow whose husband died recently. His death certificate states that he died as a result of coal dust on the lungs, but she too has been denied the right to claim compensation, unlike many thousands of miners' widows throughout the country.
	The DTI has made some concessions to surface workers, but only if they can prove that they worked for a minimum of five years underground as part of their employment after 1954. I understand that the concession was made on the basis that if a man already suffered from some disability owing to his underground exposure, work on the surface might increase that disability. I consider that illogical. A surface worker could easily have accumulated far more exposure to dust over, say, 30 years than a man who had worked underground for five years and then worked on the surface for 15.
	If it is accepted that surface dust contributes to the cause of disabling chronic obstructive pulmonary disease when combined with underground dust, why should it not be accepted that the same surface dust alone contributes to it? There is evidence—and I have talked to many who have worked in the coal industry, including my father—that many surface jobs, especially those involved in the preparation plants and in the washing of coal, exposed workers to dust levels that were far higher than those experienced by workers underground.
	The claimants' solicitors group has also produced some evidence from an environmental study carried out in 1956 that indicates that dust levels at the surface of some collieries were higher than the levels recorded underground.Like Mr. Lynn, many surface workers have medical evidence to confirm that they are suffering from COPD. Despite that, however, the DTI has now issued a blanket denial of liability in respect of purely surface workers, and in respect of those with less than five years underground post-1954.
	It is now four years since the handling agreement was put in place and three years since the DTI put a minute before Parliament accepting liability for the dust exposure of surface workers. In that time, surface workers have continued to suffer, and to die. Often, they live next door to other former employees of British Coal who have been rightly compensated for their disability, and they find it hard to understand why they cannot be treated in the same way.
	Four years on, the issue of compensation for surface workers needs to be addressed urgently by the Government. Failure to do so will mean that the cases will be put before the courts, and that will be both expensive and time consuming. People continue to die and fail to understand why they cannot be treated in the same way as other British Coal employees. In addition, the good will built up in the constituencies involved—and I remind my hon. Friend the Minister that they are overwhelmingly Labour constituencies—will be lost.
	In closing, I urge the Minister to do his utmost to resolve this issue, to avoid expensive litigation, and to compensate men who, through no fault of their own, have had their health ruined because of the negligence of others.

Stephen Timms: First, I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for North Durham (Mr. Jones) on securing the debate and bringing this matter before the House. It concerns many hon. Members, especially those with constituencies in the coalfield areas, and I entirely understand the concerns that have been expressed and the strength of those concerns. I am pleased to have this opportunity to update the House on the progress that my hon. Friend has acknowledged is being made in respect of meeting the health liabilities of British Coal.
	This debate is the first opportunity that I have had to address the House on this issue, and it allows me to remind hon. Members that this Government assumed not only a legal but a moral commitment to make sure that former miners, and their families, receive the compensation to which they are entitled, and as speedily as possible.
	More than 450,000 claims have been registered under both the respiratory and vibration white finger schemes. That amounts to the largest personal injury scheme ever in this country, and possibly the largest ever in the world. We are still receiving more than 4,000 new claims a week under the respiratory disease scheme, and it is impossible at the moment to say when all the claims will be settled. However, I can say that my Department and our contractors are committed to ensuring that our obligations are met in full.
	My hon. Friend referred to the fact that the respiratory disease liability stems from a High Court judgment handed down by Sir Michael Turner in January 1998. That judgment found British Coal liable for causing a number of respiratory diseases, including chronic bronchitis and emphysema, in miners who worked underground after 1954.
	The judgment did not cover those miners who had worked solely on the surface. However, as part of the ongoing negotiations between the Department and solicitors, we looked at the possibilities of assessing surface-only claims through the scheme. My hon. Friend referred to the minute that the Department placed before Parliament in July 2000, which proposed to accept some liability in relation to surface dust, although—as my hon. Friend will see from the minute—the precise extent of that liability, and the detailed arrangements for the payment of any compensation to this group, would have to be negotiated between the parties.
	As a result of those negotiations, the Department offered to process claims for miners who had so-called mixed employment—those who had worked underground and in dusty jobs on the surface. The claimants' solicitors accepted that offer and those mixed workers have been able to have medical assessments and receive offers in the same way as underground workers since then.
	My hon. Friend asked in particular about the case of a blacksmith. Where claimants worked in such jobs—spending part of their week above ground and part underground—the Department is putting evidence to an expert panel, the dust reference panel, which is establishing the amount of time spent underground in any given week. Compensation is being paid for that underground exposure. Blacksmiths are shortly to be referred to that panel.
	For surface-only workers, the position is more complex. It is not the case that the Department has a blanket ban, as my hon. Friend suggested. As long ago as November 2000 the Department offered to allow surface-only workers access to the medical assessment process for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease where there was evidence of substantial exposure to dust. The criterion for entry to the process was evidence of pneumoconiosis—a disease that occurs only as a result of dust exposure and not as a result of smoking. As my hon. Friend will appreciate, there is a need to disentangle the two.
	The claimants' solicitors felt unable to accept that offer on the basis that they believed all men in the agreed categories of dusty jobs on the surface—for example, those working in the preparation plants—should have access to the medical assessment process.
	We have also offered to discuss compensation for surface-only workers for chronic bronchitis and the temporary exacerbation of asthma. Again, the claimants' solicitors have not to date accepted that offer, although they have asked within the past few weeks to look at it again with officials.
	More recently, the Department has offered to consider individual claims for COPD brought forward by the claimants' solicitors on a common law basis, on the basis that some highly susceptible individuals might be more at risk of COPD than the generality of surface workers.
	All those steps show that the Department is committed to paying fair compensation to that group of claimants. The step that we are unable to take at present is to put all workers in surface dusty jobs through the main medical assessment process for COPD on a schemed basis. I will explain why that is a difficult step for the Department to take at the moment in the light of the medical evidence that we have received. Notwithstanding that, the compromises that we have made do not amount to the blanket ban that my hon. Friend suggested was in place.
	I understand why the solicitors have not felt able to accept any of the offers that we have made to date. They feel that the Department's medical evidence is based on incorrect data. If they could demonstrate that, the medical issues would have to be re-examined in the light of that new information and might well point to a different conclusion. It could then be possible to achieve a comprehensive settlement for surface workers, rather than progressing on a piecemeal basis. I do not want to blame anyone for the delays. We are all in this together. There has been some good co-operation between the parties—the claimants' solicitors and the Department. However, those outside the process occasionally fall into the trap of thinking that no progress has been made or that the Government are dragging their feet. I hope that it is becoming clear from my speech that that is not the case.

Jimmy Hood: I understand that this is the first time that my hon. Friend has spoken at the Dispatch Box on this subject. He is making some interesting points.
	I wish to put down a marker and to raise an important issue, which has not had the publicity that it should: the miners who worked for the National Coal Board and private mining companies. As I understand it, the Department is reluctant to settle with miners who are entitled to compensation but who worked partly for the coal board and partly for private mining companies because the private companies' insurers are not prepared to sign up to the scheme. I raise that with my hon. Friend and hope that he will pay it some careful attention and seek a solution. Thousands of miners are suffering great injustices. They are entitled to compensation, but they are denied it because those insurance companies have not signed up.

Stephen Timms: I shall certainly look into the important point that my hon. Friend makes, which has been raised with me in the past. The liability on the Government applies to those who worked with British Coal; the scheme relates to British Coal's health liabilities. However, I shall look closely into the extent to which we have made progress in addressing my hon. Friend's point.
	In relation to the surface-only workers about whom my hon. Friend the Member for North Durham expressed particular concern, the Department's position is based on advice provided by our medical expert: that the concentrations of respirable dust, as opposed to visible dust, on the surface were not sufficient to cause COPD in the great majority of surface-only workers, even over a working lifetime. It follows that if surface-only workers have COPD, according to our advice it is most likely to have been caused by smoking, as it certainly can be. It is worth remembering that, under the terms of the underground scheme, the effects of smoking 15 cigarettes a day are held to cause damage equivalent to the dust exposure of a face worker, and compensation payments to smokers are discounted accordingly.

Kevan Jones: With great respect, that is nonsense. I used to deal daily with compensation claims in the shipyards, where a certain percentage of the claim was taken off for smokers to take account of damage not caused by dust. The Department's approach seems to make the generalisation that many people are suffering due to exposure to other things, such as tobacco smoke. In many cases—for example, that of Mr. Lynn—the people involved have never smoked a cigarette.

Stephen Timms: I think that my hon. Friend may not have quite caught my point. I was making the point that, indeed, under the terms of the underground scheme, the effects of smoking 15 cigarettes a day are held to cause damage equivalent to the dust exposure of a face worker, and compensation payments are discounted accordingly.
	The Department's medical advice is based on the only dust figures for the surface currently available to the parties and on assumptions relating to loss of lung function that have been accepted by the judge. The differences between the Department and the claimants' solicitors relate to the medical evidence and the consequences that flow from that. We agree with the claimants' solicitors in wanting fair compensation for that cohort of claimants. It is not the case that we want to resist a well-founded claim, but medical evidence is needed to substantiate the case and the problem is that, at present, there is none.
	We want to co-operate with everybody involved to reach a fair settlement. We are not resisting a fair settlement if evidence can be found to justify the points that have been made.

Dennis Skinner: My hon. Friend has suggested that the door has been opened and that he will look at the blacksmiths' case, the insurance case, the private mines and some of the other cases. Is he aware that those of us who worked on the screes removing the dirt from the coal were exposed to more dust than about 80 per cent. of the miners underground? He can take it from me—I did 21 years. Some of my friends refused to work on the screes because it was a lousier job than working underground. While he is in this benevolent mood, will he look into that? Will he make sure that things are dealt with before the cut-off date next year? I am worried that if the cut-off date is reached some of the other changes might never take place.

Stephen Timms: I am aware of the point that my hon. Friend makes, and I say again that there needs to be medical evidence to allow us to go beyond what we have done so far and such evidence has not been forthcoming at the moment.
	The Department was pleased to co-operate with a proposal from the claimants' solicitors to study data on pneumoconiosis among surface-only workers and to put a group of surface-only workers through the medical assessment process. My predecessor, my right hon. Friend the Leader of the House, announced that to Parliament on 30 March 2001. Data on that disease are significant because, unlike COPD, the disease can only be caused and worsened by dust. If we could establish high levels of that disease among surface-only workers, it could point to higher dust levels on the surface than our evidence to date has shown. If that were shown to be the case, our medical advice would no longer stand because it would be based on unsound evidence. But the study did not produce any evidence that required us to reconsider our medical evidence and, as a result, the position has not changed. We wrote to the claimants' solicitors in February to inform them of that.
	More recently, the solicitors chose to raise the matter with Sir Michael Turner at the High Court in July. They applied for an order requiring the Department to disclose all documentation relevant to surface dust by the end of August, to be followed by mediation to determine the issues still between the parties. They asked that, if the mediation were unsuccessful, the judge should give directions for litigation of the issues in the framework of the existing coal health respiratory disease litigation. The judge did not grant the order, but he requested instead that the solicitors identify a number of lead cases and that they investigate their dust exposure and medical circumstances and put them forward at the next court hearing for the Department to consider. It is hoped that that will give the Department sufficient information to decide whether there are points between the parties that can be resolved by mediation.
	At a meeting of the coal health ministerial monitoring group last month, the solicitors made it clear that they were having difficulty identifying lead cases and asked the Department to assist by opening its archives to them in advance of identifying the cases. We were entirely happy to co-operate with that request. We have granted access to British Coal's archives to allow a search for surface dust records. We are next due to appear before Sir Michael on 10 November to report on progress made.
	I wish to say to my hon. Friend the Member for North Durham and others in the Chamber and elsewhere who have followed this matter very closely that we have done everything possible—through the offers we made to compensate some cohorts of surface-only workers, through the joint surface dust study and through the opening of British Coal's archives to the solicitors—to give those in the group an opportunity to establish their case. But my hon. Friend will recognise that the Government also have a responsibility to the taxpayer, who is funding compensation, to ensure that compensation is paid only where the Department is genuinely liable, and I make no apology for our adopting a robust approach. If the claimants' solicitors can establish their case—we have been genuinely as helpful as we can in assisting their efforts to do so—we will ensure that payment is made to that cohort of men as soon as possible, but we cannot pay compensation on the basis of the existing medical evidence; the medical case is simply not there.
	I should like to say a little about more general progress. This is a huge responsibility, and from the outset the Under-Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, my hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh, South (Nigel Griffiths) and I have set about meeting all the parties involved in the process to ensure that we are doing everything that we can to make progress. We have held useful meetings with the solicitors representing the claimants, mining union representatives, coalfield campaigners and the Department's own contractors under the auspices of the Department's ministerial monitoring group, and progress continues to be good.
	Under the two schemes, a total of £13.7 million has been paid out in both interim and full and final settlements to those in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for North Durham. Of course, more needs to be done, and we will continue to be as helpful as we can in establishing claims if the medical evidence is forthcoming, and it occurs to me that perhaps my hon. Friend will have suggestions to make to the claimants' solicitors to assist them in identifying individuals who may be able to help, through their own experience, to establish a case.
	The motion having been made at Six o'clock, and the debate having continued for half an hour, Mr. Deputy Speaker adjourned the House, without Question put, pursuant to the Standing Order.
	Adjourned at half-past Six o'clock.